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AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



UNTFORM LIBRARY EDTTToy OF THE Ml .OCS 

WOBKS 01 ET MILL. 

I an<l laid paper, 8vo, $2.25 pvr vol. (except vol on Comta. 
The Autobiography. 1 
Dissertations and Discussions. 4 vols. 
Considerations on Representative Government. 1 vol. 
Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. 

8 vols. 
On Liberty ; The Subjection of Women. Both in 1 voL 
Comte's Positive Philosophy. 1 vol., $1.50. 

Representative Government. 12mo, plain, $ I 
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o 

Ml *TB. 

John Stuart Mill: H Mid Works. 

- 
v 

1! 

x? &» a Practical 

uaopber, bj .er. lo/no, 

HENHY HOLT A CO., Publishers, N. Y. 



AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



■v 



?* 



BY 



JOHN STUART MILL 




NEW YORK 
HENET HOLT AND COMPANY 

1874. 






PUBLISHED BY ARRANOBMSNT UY777 THE AUi HOB 8 

EXECUTOR. 






CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. 
1806—1819. 
Childhood and Early Education, 1. 

CHAPTER II. 

1813—1821. 

Moral Influences in Early Youth, 38. My Father's Character and 
Opinions, 46. 

CHAPTER IH. 
1821—1823. 
Last Stage of Education and first of Self-Education, 62. 

CHAPTER IV. 

1823—1828. 

Youthful Propagandism, 87, 113. Westminster Review, 91, 129. 

CHAPTER V. 

1826—1832. 
A Crisis in my Mental History, 132. One Stage Onward, 111. 



VI 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VL 
1830— 1840. 

Commencement of the most valuable Friendship of my Life, 184, 

My Father's Death, 202. Writings and other Pj gp up 

to 1840, 20G. 



CHAPTER VII. 



"—1870. 



General View of the Remainder <rf nr BOS :— 

Completion <>f the System of L< 
Principles of Political 1 , 884. 

tirement from ti ie, 248. Publication of" I 

251 .Con- i on & .tive G 

Civil War in A 

Hamilton's Philoeo] hy, 273. 1' • 
m Hinder of my J.. 



CHAPTER I. 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

I T seems proper that I should prefix to the following 
biographical sketch, some mention of the reasons 
which have made me think it desirable that I should 
leave behind me such a memorial ot so uneventful a 
life as mine. I do not for a moment imagine that 
any part of what I have to relate, can be interesting 
to the public as a narrative, or as being connected 
with myself But I have thought that in an age in 
which education, and its improvement, are the subject 
of more, if not of profounder study than at any 
former period of English history, it may be useful 
that there should be some record of an education 
which was unusual and remarkable, and which, 
whatever else it may have done, has proved how 
much more than is commonly supposed may be 
taught, and well taught, in those early years which, 
in the common modes of what is called instruc- 
tion, are little better than wasted. It has also 
seemed to me that in an age of transition in opinions, 
there may be somewhat both of interest and of 
benefit in noting* the successive phases of any mind 



2 CHILDHOOD AND EABLY EDUCATION. 

which was always pressing forward, equally ready to 
learn and to unlearn either from its own thoughts or 
from those of others. But a motive which \ 
more with me than either of these, is a desire to 
make acknowledgment of the debts which my 
intellectual and moral development owes to otl. 
persons ; some of them of recognised eminence, 
others less known than they deserve to be, and the 
one to wdiom most of all is due, one whom * rid 

had no opportunity of knowing. The reader whom 
these things do not interest, lias only 1 to 

blame if he reads farther, and I do not desire any 
other indulgence from him than that of 1 in 

mind, that for him I not written, 

I was born in London, on I ', 1806, 

and was the eldest son of James Mill, I 
the History of British India. My r, the son 

of a petty tradesman and (I believe) small E 
Northwater Bridge, in the county of i 
when a boy, recommended by his abilities to the 
notice of Sir John Stuart, of Fettercaim, one of t 
Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, and was, in 
consequence, sent to the University of Edinbui| 
the expense of a fund established by Lady Jane 
Stuart (the wife of Sir John Stuart) and B< 
ladies for educating young men i 
Church. He there went through t" 
of study, and was licensed as a Preach . 



CHILDHOOD AND EAKLY EDUCATION. 3 

followed the profession ; having satisfied himself that 
he could not believe the doctrines of that or any ^ 
other Church. For a few years he was a private tutor 
in various families in Scotland, among others that 
of the Marquis of Tweeddale, but ended by taking 
up his residence in London, and devoting himself to 
authorship. Nor had he any other means of support 
until 1819, when he obtained an appointment in the 
India House. 

In this period of my father's life there are two 
things which it is impossible not to be struck with : 
one of them unfortunately a very common circum- 
stance, the other a most uncommon one. The first 
is, that in his position, with no resource but the 
precarious one of writing in periodicals, he married 
and had a large family ; conduct than which nothing 
could be more opposed, both as a matter of good 
sense and of duty, to the opinions which, at least at 
a later period of life, he strenuously upheld. The 
other circumstance, is the extraordinary energy which 
was required to lead the life he led, with the disad- 
vantages under which he laboured from the first, and 
with those which he brought upon himself by his 
marriage. It would have been no small thing, had 
he done no more than to support himself and his 
family during so many years by writing, without 
ever being in debt, or in any pecuniary difficulty ; 
holding, as he did, opinions, both in politics and in 

*> 2 



4 CHILDHOOD AND EAKLY EDUCATION, 

religion, which were more odious to all persons of 
influence, and to the common run of prosperous 
Englishmen in that generation than either before or 
Bince ; and being not only a man whom nothing 
would have induced to write against his convic- 
tions, but one who invariably threw into everything 
he wrote, as much of his convictions as he thought 
the circumstances would in any way permit : being, 
it must also be said, one who never did anything 
negligently ; never undertook any task, literary or 
other, on which he did not conscientiously bestow all 
the labour necessary for performing it adequately. 
But he, with these burdens on him, planned, com- 
menced, and completed, the History of India ; and 
this in the course of about ten years, a shorter 
time than has been occupied (even by writers who 
had no other employment) in the production of almost 
any other historical work of equal bulk, and of any- 
thing approaching to the same amount of reading 
and research. And to this is to be added, that during 
the whole period, a considerable part of almost every 
day was employed in the instruction of his children : 
in the case of one of whom, myself, he exerted an 
amount of labour, care, and perseverance rarely, if 
ever, employed for a similar purpose, in endeavour- 
ing to give, according to his own conception, the 
highest order of intellectual education. 

A man who, in his own practice, so vigorously 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 5 

acted up to the principle of losing no time, was likely 
to adhere to the same rule in the instruction of his 
pupil I have no remembrance of the time when I 
began to learn Greek, I have been told that it was 
when I was three years old. My earliest recollection 
on the subject, is that of committing to memory what 
my father termed vocables, being lists of common 
Greek words, with their signification in English, 
which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, 
until some years later, I learnt no more than the 
inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course 
of vocables, proceeded at once to translation ; and I 
faintly remember going through ^Esop's Fables, 
the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, 
which I remember better, was the second. I learnt 
no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had 
read, under my father's tuition, a number of Greek 
prose authors, among whom I remember the whole 
of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's Cyropaedia and 
Memorials of Socrates ; some of the lives of the 
philosophers by Diogenes Laertius ; part of Lucian, 
and Isocrates ad Demonicum and Ad Nicoclem. I 
also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the 
common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron 
to the Theoctetus inclusive : which last dialogue, I 
venture to think, would have been better omitted, 
as it was totally impossible I should understand it. 
But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me 



6 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

not only the utmost that I could do, but-much that I 
could by no possibility have done. What he was 
himself willing to undergo for the sake of my instruc- 
tion, may be judged from the fact, that I went through 
the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in 
the same room and at the same table at which he 
was writing : and as in those days Greek and English 
lexicons were not, and I could make no more use 
of a Greek and Latin lexicon than could be made 
without having yet begun to learn Latin, I was 
forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of 
every word which I did not know. This incessant 
interruption, he, one of the most impatient of men, 
submitted to, and wrote under that interruption 
several volumes of his History and all else that he 
had to write during those years. 

The only thing besides Greek, that I learnt as a 
lesson in this part of my childhood, was arithmetic : 
this also my father taught me : it was the task of 
the evenings, and I well remember its disagreeable- 
ness. But the lessons were only a part of the daily 
instruction I received. Much of it consisted in the 
books I read by myself, and my father s discourses to 
me, chiefly during our walks. From 1810 to the end 
of 1813 we were living in Newington Green, then an 
almost rustic neighbourhood. My father's health 
required considerable and constant exercise, and he 
walked habitually before breakfast, generally in the 



CHILDHOOD AND EAULY EDUCATION. 7 

green lanes towards Hornsey. In these walks I always 
accompanied him, and with my earliest recollections 
of green fields and wild flowers, is mingled that of 
the account I gave him daily of what I had read 
the day before. To the best of my remembrance, 
this was a voluntary rather than a prescribed exer- 
cise. I made notes on slips of paper while reading, 
and from these in the morning walks, I told the story 
to him ; for the books were chiefly histories, of which 
I read in this manner a great number : Robertson's 
histories, Hume, Gibbon ; but my greatest delight, 
then and for long afterwards, was Watson's Philip 
the Second and Third. The heroic defence of the 
Knights of Malta against the Turks, and of the 
revolted Provinces of the Netherlands against Spain, 
excited in me an intense and lasting interest. Next 
to Watson, my favourite historical reading was 
Hooke's History of Rome. Of Greece I had seen 
at that time no regular history, except school abridg- 
ments and the last two or three volumes of a trans- 
lation of Rollin's Ancient History, beginning 
with Philip of Macedon. But I read with great 
delight Langhorne's translation of Plutarch. In 
English history, beyond the time at which Hume 
leaves off, I remember reading Burnet's History of 
his Own Time, though I caxed little for anything in 
it except the wars and battles ; and the historical 
part of the " Annual Register," from the beginning 



8 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION'. 

to about 1788, where the volumes my father b 

rowed for me from Mr. Bentham left off I felt a 

lively interest in Frederic of Prussia durii. 

difficulties, and in Paoli, the I 

when I came to the American war, I took I 

part, like a child as I was (until set right by my 

father) on the wrong side, because it was called the 

English side. In these frequent I about the 

books I read, he used, as opportunity offered, to give 

me explanations and ideas respect 

government, morality, mental cultii which ho 

required me afterwards to te to him in my own 

words. He also made d, and him a 

verbal account of, many 1" oks which w< 

interested me sufficiently to induce me to read th 

of myself : among others, Millar's Hisi 

of the English Government, a book of gr 

for its time, and which he highly valued ; Moshei 

Ecclesiastical History, McCrie's Life of .1 

Knox, and even Sewell and Hatty's II; 

the Quakers. He was fond ot pi 

hands books which exhibited men of 

resource in unusual circumstances, struggli] 

difficulties and overcoming them: of such works 

I remember Beavers African Mem 

Collins s Account of the First Settlement oi \ 

South Wales. Two books which I never v 

of reading were Anson's Voyages, — deligl ul bo 



>D USD EARLY BDTCATKEf. 9 

roost your sons, and a collection (Hawkes- 

th's, I )ofVoy; ound the World, in 

■ volumes, beginningwith D «*h 

I ,k and Bougainville. Of child* 8, any 

more than of playthings, 1 had » any. except 

, f r om a i r acquaintance : 

1 had, I Crusoe was pre- 

eill i .id oonti] i delist me through all 

: lioyhood. It was no however, of my fether's 

dude books of amusement, though he 
.,,,,1 them very sparintfy. Of such books he 

hut he borrowed 

which 1 remember arc the 

bian • , Arabian Tales, Don 

Popular Tales, and a 
k of some reputation in i a $<*& 

of I 
],, „,. I ed learning Latin, 

in conjunction with a younger to whom I 

,„,. and who afterwards repeated 

.. to my 1-: and from this time, other 

and brothers being successively add.-,] 

sonsiderabl day's work consisted 

of this preparatory teaching. II partwhichl 

,ily disliked ; the more bo, as 1 was held respon- 

,ns of my pupils, in almost as lull a 

sense as for my own : I, however, derived from this 

discipline the great advantage, of learning more 



( 



10 CHILDHOOD AND EAULY EDUCATION. 

thoroughly and retaining more lastingly the tilings 

which I was set to teach : perhaps, too, the pra 

it afforded in explaining difficulties to others, may 

even at that age have been usefuL In other r 

the experience of my boyhood is not favourable to 

the plan of teaching children by means of one [ 

another. The teaching, I am sure ry inefficient I 

as teaching, and I well know that the rel 

tween teacher and taught is not I moral 

discipline to either. I went in this manner thn 

the Latin grammar, and a consider: 

Cornelius Nepos and Ca Commi 3, but 

afterwards added to the SU] so 

lessons, much longer ones of my o\\ n. 

In the same year in which I began Latin, I 
my first commencement in the Gi be 

Iliad. After I had made some progress in thi 
father put Popes translation into my hands. It v 
the first English verse I had cared to read it 

became one of the books in which for many 
I most delighted : I think I must have read it fi 
twenty to thirty times through. I should not ha 
thought it worth while to mention a tas; 
so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, ' 
observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant 
specimen of narrative and versification is 
universal with boys, as I should haw 
a priori and from my individual expel 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 11 

aftei this time I commenced Euclid, and somewhat 

t, Algebra, still under my fathers tuition. 

From my eighth to my twelfth year, the Latin 

books which I remember reading were, the Bucolics 

of Virgil, and the first six books of the ^Eneid ; all 

Horace, except the Epodes ; the Fables of Phaedrus ; 

the first five of Livy (to which from my love 

of the subject I voluntarily added, in my hours of 

ure, the remainder of the first decade) ; allSallust ; 

a oo able part of Ovid'fl Metamorphoses; some 

f Terence or three books of Lucretius; 

of the < ►rations of Cioero, and of his writings 

on i his 1 to Atticus, my father 

taking the trouble to translate to me from the 

nch the historic planations in Mingaults 

la Greek 1 read the Iliad and Odyssey 

through ; one or two plays of Sophocles, Euripides, 

and Aristophanes, tl by these I profited little ; 

all Thucydides; the Hellenics of Xenophon ; a 

it part of 1 )( in liines, and Lysias ; 

Theocritus; A <u; part of the Anthology; a little 

of I us ; several books of Polybius ; and lastly 

Aristotle's Rhetoric, which, as the first expressly 

itise on any moral or psychological 

subject which I h 1, and containing many of the 

vations of the ancients on human nature 

and life, my father made me study with peculiar 

care, and throw the matter of it into synoptic 



12 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION 

tables. During the same years I learnt elementary 
geometry and algebra thoroughly, the differential 
calculus, and other portions of the higher mathe- 
matics far from thoroughly : for my father, not 
having kept up this part of his early acquired know- 
ledge, could not spare time to qualify himself foi 
removing my difficulties, and left me to deal with 
them, with little other aid than that of books : while 
I was continually incurring his displeasure by my in- 
ability to solve difficult problems for which he did not 
see that I had not the necessary previous knowledge. 
As to my private reading, I can only speak 01 what 
I remember. History continued to be my strongest 
predilection, and most of all ancient history. Mitford's 
Greece I read continually ; my father had put me on 
my guard against the Tory prejudices of this writer, 
and his perversions of facts for the whitewashing of 
despots, and blackening of popular institutions. 
These points he discoursed on, exemplifying them 
from the Greek orators and historians, with such 
effect that in reading Mitford my sympatliies were 
always on the contrary side to those of the author, 
and I could, to some extent, have argued the point 
against him : yet this did not diminish the ever new 
pleasure with which I read the book. Roman 
history, both in my old favourite, Hooke, and in 
Ferguson, continued to delight me. A book which, 
in spite of what is called the dryness of its style, 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 13 

I took great pleasure in, was the Ancient Universal 
History, through the incessant reading of which, I 
had my head fall of historical details concerning 
the obscurest ancient people, while about modern 
history, except detached passages, such as the 
Dutch War of Independence, I knew and cared 
comparatively little. A voluntary exercise, to which 
throughout my boyhood I was much addicted, was 
what I called writing histories. I successively com- 
posed a Roroan History, picked out of Hooke ; an 
Abridgment of the Ancient Universal History ; a 
History of Holland, from my favourite Watson and 
from an anonymous compilation ; and in my eleventh 
and twelfth year I occupied myself with writing 
what I flattered myself was something serious. This 
was no less than a History of the Roman Government, 
compiled (with the assistance of Hooke) from Livy 
and Dionysius : of which I wrote as much as would 
have made an octavo volume, extending to the epoch 
of the Licinian Laws. It was, in fact, an account of 
the struggles between the patricians and plebeians, 
which now engrossed all the interest in my mind 
which I had previously felt in the mere wars and 
conquests of the Romans. I discussed all the con- 
stitutional points as they arose : though quite igno- 
rant of Niebuhr's researches, I, by such lights as my 
father had given me, vindicated the Agrarian Laws 
on the evidence of Livy, and upheld, to the best of 



14 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 



my ability, the Roman Democratic party. A few 
years later, in my contempt of my childish efforts, I 
destroyed all these papers, not then anticipating that I 
could ever feel any curiosity about my first attempts 
writing and reasoning. My father enco me in 

this useful amusement, though, as I think ju< lv, 

he never asked to see what I wrote ; so that I did not 
feel that in writing it I was accountable to any one, nor 
had the chilling sensation of being under a critical < 
But though these exercises in history were nn 
a compulsory lesson, there was another kind of com- 
position which was so, name! 
it was one of the mo.-t disag Le of my 

Greek and Latin verses I did not wrii 
prosody of those languages, My I 
not worth the time it required, contented himf 
with making me read aloud to him, and correct] 
false quantities. I never composed at all in Grei 
even in prose, and but little in Latin. Not that my 
father could be indifferent to the value of this j >r 
in giving a thorough knowledge of these 1 
but because there really was not time for it. T 
verses I was required to write were English. When 
I first read Pope's Homer, I ambitiously attem] 
compose something of the same kind, and achieved aa 
much as one book of a continuation of the Hi; 
There, probably, the spontaneous promptings of my 
poetical ambition would have stopped; but the 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 15 

exercise, begun from choice, was continued by com- 
mand. Conformably to my fathers usual practice of ex- 
plaining to me, as far as possible, the reasons for what 
he required me to do, he gave me, for this, as I well 
remember, two reasons highly characteristic of him : 
one was, that some things could be expressed better 
and more forcibly in verse than in prose : this, he 
said, was a real advantage. The other was, that 
people in general attached more value to verse than 
it deserved, and the power of writing it, was, on this 
account, worth acquiring. lie generally left me to 
choose my own subjects, which, as far as I remember, 
were mostly addresses to some my t liological personage 
or allegorical abstraction; but he made me translate 
into 1 Snglish verse many of Horace's shorter poems : 
I also remember his giving me Thomsons " Winter' 
to read, and aft erwards making me attempt (without 
book) to write something myself on the same subject. 
The s I wrote were, of course, the merest rubbish, 

nor did I ever attain any facility of versification, but 
the practice may have been useful in making it easier 
for me, at a later period, to acquire readiness of ex- 
pression.* I had read, up to this time, very little 



* In a subsequent stage of boyhood, when these exercises had 
•ompulsory, like most youthful writers I wrote tragedies ; 
under the inspiration not so much of Shakspeare as of Joanna Baillie, 
whose " Constantine Paleologus" in particular appeared to me one of 
the most glorious of human compositions. I still think it one of the 
best dramas of the last two centuries. 



16 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

English poetry. Shakspeare my father liacl put into 
my hands, chiefly for the sake of the historical pi. 
from which, however, I went on to the others. My 
father never was a great admirer of Shaks] lie 

English idolatry of whom lie used to attack with 
some severity. He cared little for ;my English poetry 
except Milton (for whom ha had the highest admira- 
tion), Goldsmith, Burns, and I Bard, which lie 
preferred to his Elegy: perhaps I may add Cow] 
andBeattie. He hadsoin valur iorSpen 
member his reading to me (unlike his usual ] 
of making me read to him), tl. book of bl 
Fairie Queene ; but I took little pleasure in it. The 
poetry of the present century he saw Iv any 
merit in, and I haqdly became acquainted wit! 
of it till I was grown up to manhood 
metrical romances of Walter Soott, which 1 r 
his recommendation and was intensely delighl 
with ; as I always was with animated narrative. 
Dryden's Poems were amoni; my father's books, 
many of these he made me read, but I never 
for any of them except Alexander's Feast, which, 
well as many of the songs in Walter 
sing internally, to a music of my own: to some of the 
latter, indeed, I went so far as to compos which 
I still remember. Cowper's short poems 1 d id with 
some pleasure, but never got far into the Loll 
and nothing in the two volumes interested me like 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 17 

the prose account of his three hares. In my thirteenth 
year I met with Campbells poems, among which 
Lochiel, Hohenlinden, The Exile of Erin, and 
some othe e me sensations I had never before 

experienced from poetry. Here, too, I made nothing 
of the longer s, except the striking opening of 

Gertrude of Wyoming, which long kept its place 
in my feelings as the perfection of pathos. 

Daring this part of my childhood, one of my greatest 
amusemei perimental science; in the theo- 

icalj however, not the pract i<*al s mse of tla k word ; 
not trying experimente -a kind of discipline which I 
have often regretted not having bad —nor even seeing, 
l>ut merely reading about them. I never rememher 
beii up in any book, as I was in Joyce's 

ientific Dialogues; and I was rather recalcitrant 
to my father's criticisms of the bad reasoning respect- 
ing the tirst principles of physics, which abounds in the 

lv part of that work. I devoured treatises on 
Chemistry, especially thai of my father's early friend 
and schoolfellow, Dr. Thomson, for years before I 
attended a lecture or saw an experiment. 

From about the age of twelve, I entered into another 
and more advanced stage in my course of instruction ; 
in which the main object was no longer the aids and 
appliances of thought, but the thoughts themselves. 
This commenced with Logic, in which I began at once 
with the Organon, and read it to the Analytics 

c 



18 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION, 

inclusive, but profited little by the Posterior Ana- 
lytics, which, belong to a branch of speculation 1 
was not yet ripe for. Contemporaneously with the 
Organon, my father made me read the whole or parts 
of several of the Latin t s on the - 

logic; giving each day to him, in om a minul 

account of what I had read, and a bis nu- 

merous and searching qua this, I 

in a similar manner, through the "Oomputatio give 
Logica" of Hobbes, a work ofa much higher order of 
thought than the books of the school 1 
which he estimated very highly ; in my ownopini 
beyond its merits, great as th< It n in- 

variable practice, whatever studi< 
me, to make me as far as p 
feel the utility of them : and this he <!• 
peculiarly fitting in th< of the 

the usefulness of which had been impugned by 
many writers of authority. I well rei 
and in what particular walk, in the n< ur- 

hood of Bagshot Heath (where we 
to his old friend Mr. Wallace, then one of the Matl - 
matical Professors at Sandhurst) he firs 
by questions to make me think on the 1 

frame some conception of what constituted the 
of the syllogistic logic, and when I had failed in this, 
make me understand it by explanations. Theexpla 
tions did not make the matter at all clear to I 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 19 

time ; but they were not therefore useless; they re- 
mained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections 
to crystallize upon; the import of Lis general remarks 
being interpreted to me, by the particular instant 
whirl i came under m\ fterwards. My own 

conscio i and exp • ultimately led me to 

■ quite as highly as he did, the value of an 
J familiarity with the school logic. I 
know of nothing, in my education, to which I think 
myself move in I for whatever capacity of 

thinkmg I lr The first intellectual 

ion in which I arrived at any proficiency, was 
ing a had argument, and finding in what \ 
fallacy lay: and thoqgh whatever capacity of 
this s<>rt I attained, was duo to the fact that it 

in which I was mosl 
perseveringly drilled by my father, yei it is also true 
that tf id tlio mental habits acquired 

in studying it. were among the principal instruments 
of this drilling. I am persuaded that nothing, in 
n, tends so much, when properly 
d, to fara I thinkers, who attach a precise 

ining to words and propositions, and are not mi- 
ll by i loose, or ambiguous terms. The 
i influence of mathematical studios is nothing 
to it ; for in mathematical pro none of the real 
difficulties of correct ratiocination occur. It is also a 
study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the 

c 2 



20 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

education of philosophical students, since ik does not 
presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience 
and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own. They 
may become capable of disentangling the intricacies of 
confused and self-contradictory thought, before their 
own thinking faculties are much advanced ; a power 
which, for want of some such discipline, many other- 
wise able men altogether lack ; and when they have 
to answer opponents, only endeavour, by such argu- 
ments as they can command, to support the opposite 
conclusion, scarcely even attempting to confute the 
reasonings of their antagonists ; and, therefore, at the 
utmost, leaving the question, as far as it depends on 
argument, a balanced one. 

During this time, the Latin and Greek books which 
I continued to read with my father were chiefly such 
as were worth studying, not for the language merely, 
but also for the thoughts. This included much of 
the orators, and especially Demosthenes, some of 
whose principal orations I read several times over, 
and wrote out, by way of exercise, a full analysis of 
them. My father's comments on these orations when 
I read them to him were very instructive to me. He 
not only drew my attention to the insight they 
afforded into Athenian institutions, and the principles 
of legislation and government which they often 
illustrated, but pointed out the skill and art of the 
orator — how everything important to his purpose 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 21 

was said at the exact moment when he had brought 
the minds of his audience into the state most fitted 
to receive it ; how he made steal into their minds, 
gradually and by insinuation, thoughts which, if 
expressed in a more direct manner would have roused 
their opposition. Most of these reflections were 
beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the 
time ; but they left seed behind, which germinated in 
due season. At this time I also read the whole of 
Tacitus, Juvenal, and Quintilian. The latter, owing to 
his obscure style and to the scholastic details of which 
many parts of his treatise are made up, is little read, 
and seldom sufficiently appreciated. His book is a 
kind of encyclopaedia of the thoughts of the ancients 
on the whole field of education and culture ; and I 
have retained through life many valuable ideas which 
I can distinctly trace to my reading of him, even at 
that early age. It was at this period that I read, for 
the first time, some of the most important dialogues 
of Plato, in particular the Gorgias, the Protagoras, 
and the Republic. There is no author to whom my 
father thought himself more indebted for his own 
mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more 
frequently recommended to young students. I can 
bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The 
Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are 
the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for 
correcting the errors, and clearing up the confusions 



22 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

incident to the intellectus sibi pernrissus^the under- 
standing which has made up all its bundles of asso- 
ciations under the guidance of popular phraseology. 
The close, searching elenchus by which the man of 
vague generalities is constrained either to express his 
meaning to himself in definite terms, or to conl 
that he does not know what he is talking about ; 
the perpetual testing of all general statements by 
particular instances ; th in form which is 1 id 

to the meaning of large abe by fbri 

upon some still larger class-name which includ< 
and more, and dividing down to the thi fht — 

marking out its limits and definition by a 
accurately drawn distinctions between Li &ch of 

the cognate objects which are successively parted 
from it — all this, as an education I thinkii 

is inestimable, and all this, even at tl 
such hold of me that it became part of my own mi 
I have felt ever since that the title of PL 
belongs by far better right to those who hav< 
nourished in, and have endeavoured to pr 
Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are 
distinguished only by the adoption of c 
dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the le 
intelligible of his works, and which the chn 
his mind and writings makes it uncertain w he 

himself regarded as anything more than 
fancies, or philosophic conjectures. 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 23 

In going through Plato and Demosthenes, since I 
could now read these authors, as far as the language 
was concerned, with perfect ease, I was not required 
to construe them sentence by sentence, but to read 
them aloud to my father, answering questions when 

:ed : but the particular attention which he paid to 
elocution (in winch his own excellence was remark- 
able) made this reading aloud to him a most painful 
task. Of all tilings which he required me to do, 
there was none which I did so constantly ill, or in 
which he so perpetually lost his temper with me. 
He had thought much on the principles of the art of 
reading, especially the most neglected part of it, the 
inflections of the voice, or modulation as writers on 
elocution call it (in contrast with articulation on the 
one side, and expi on the other), and had reduced 

it to rules, grounded on the logical analysis of a sen- 
tence. These rules he strongly impressed upon me, 
and took me severely to task for every violation of 
them : but I even then remarked (though I did not 
venture to make the remark to him) that though he 
reproached me when I read a sentence ill, and told 
me how I ought to have read it, he never, by reading 
it himself, showed me how it ought to be read. A 
defect running through his otherwise admirable 
modes of instruction, as it did through all his modes 
of thought, was that of trusting too much to the in- 
telligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied in 



24 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

the concrete. It was at a much later period of my 
youth, when practising elocution by myself, or with 
companions of my own age, that I for the first time 
understood the object of his rules, and saw the 
psychological grounds of them. At that time I and 
others followed out the subject into its ran 
and could have composed a very 
grounded on my father's principles, lie himself 1 
those principles and rules unwritten. I regret that 
when my mind was full of the subj< 
tematic practice, I did Dot put them, and our u 
provements of them, into a forma] 

A book which cut ributed largi ly t<> my 
in the best sense of tin 

History of India. It was published in t: /in- 

ning of 1818. During the year previous, while it was 
passing through the press, I u the pi 

sheets to him; or rather, I read the manuscript 
him while he corrected the proofs. The number 
new ideas which I received froc 
and the impulse and stimulus as well 
given to my thoughts by its criticisms and disquisi- 
tions on society and civilization in the Hindoo 
on institutions and the acts vf governments in the 
English part, made my early familiarity with it 
eminently useful to my subsequent pr And 

though I can perceive deficiencies in it new s u- 
pared with a perfect standard, I still think it, if m t 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 25 

the most, one of the most instructive histories ever 
written, and one of the books from which most 
benefit may be derived by a mind in the course of 
making up its opinions. 

The Preface, among the most characteristic of my 
father's writii well as the richest in materials of 

thought, gives a picture which may be entirely de- 
pended on, of the sentiments and expectations with 
which he wrote the History. Saturated as the book 
is with the Opinions and modes of judgment of a 
democratic radicalism then regarded as extreme; 
and treating with a severity, at that time most 
unusual, the English Constitution! the English law, 

and all parties and elasses who possessed any con- 
siderable influence in the country ; he may have 
expeeted reputation, but certainly not advancement 
in life, from its publication ; nor could he have sup- 
posed that it would raise up anything but enemies 
for him in powerful quarters; least of all could he 
have expected favour from the East India Company, 
to whose commercial privileges he was unqualifiedly 
hostile, and on the acts of whose government he had 
made so many severe comments : though, in various 
parts of his book, he bore a testimony in their favour, 
which he felt to be their just due, namely, that no 
Government had on the whole given so much proof, 
to the extent of its lights, of good intention towards 
its subjects ; and that if the acts of any other Govern- 



26 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

ment had the light of publicity as completely let in 
upon them, they would, in all probability, still L. 
bear scrutiny. 

On learning, however, in the spring of 1819, about 
a year after the publication of the History, that the 
East India Directors desired to strengthen the part 
of their home establishment which v. in 

carrying on the correspondence with India, my £atl 
declared himself a candidate for that empL ymei 
to the credit of the Directors, successfully. 1 1 
appointed one of the Assistants of the Examiner of 
India Correspondence ; officers v, uty it was to 

prepared raits of despot India, for considei 

by the Directors, in the principal depart] coad- 

ministration. In this office, and iii that of Examiner, 
which he subsequently attained, the influence which 
his talents, his reputation, and his dee" 
meter gave him, with superiors who really desu 
the good government of India, enabled him I 
extent to throw into his drafts of despatch I to 

carry through the ordeal of the Court of Directors 
and Board of Control, without having their 
much weakened, his real opinions on Ind 
In his History he had set forth, for 1 1 
many of the true principles of Indian admb 
t ration: and his despatches, following his History, 
did more than had ever been done before to pro- 
mote the improvement of India, and teach Indi 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 27 

officials to understand their business. If a selec- 
tion of them were published, they would, I am 
convinced, place his character as a practical states- 
man fully on a level with his eminence as a specula- 
tive writer. 

This new employment of his time caused no relaxa- 
tion in his attention to my education. It was in this 
same year, 1819, that he took me through a complete 
course of political economy. His loved and intimate 
friend, Ricardo, had shortly before published the book 
which formed so great an epoch in political economy ; 
a book which never would have been published 
or written, but for the entreaty and strong encourage- 
ment of my father; for Ricardo, the most modest of 
men, though firmly convinced of the truth of his 
doctrines, deemed himself so little capable of doing 
them justice in exposition and expression, that he 
shrank from the idea of publicity. The same friendly 
encouragement induced Ricardo, a year or two later, 
to become a member of the House of Commons ; 
where, during the few remaining years of his life, un- 
happily cut short in the full vigour of his intellect, he 
rendered so much service to his and my fathers opinions 
both on political economy and on other subjects. 

Though Ricardo's great work was already in print, 
no didactic treatise embodying its doctrines, in a 
manner fit for learners, had yet appeared. My father, 
therefore, commenced instructing me in the science 



28 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION-. 

by a sort of lectures, which he delivered to me in 
our walks. He expounded each day a portion of the 
subject, and I gave him next day a written account 
of it, which he made me rewrite over a: 
until it was clear, pn ad tolerably 

In this manner I went through the whole of 

the science; and the writt line of it whi 

suited from my daily CO d him 

wards as notes from which to write his EL of 

Political Economy. After this I read Ricardo, 

an account daily of what I D in 

the best manner I could, the 
offered themselves in our pi 

On Money, as them the subj 

he made me read in the same mam ad- 

mirable pamphlets, written during whi 
the Bullion controversy ; - an 

Smith ; and in this reading 
main objects to make me apply to Smith's 
superficial view of political econoi 
lights of Ricardo, and detect w] in 

Smith's arguments, us in ai lu- 

siona Such a mode of instruction 

calculated to form a tliiuker ; but it r 
worked bv a thinker, 

lather. The path was a thorny one. - im f 

aad I am sure it w \ me, notwithstandi 

>ng interest 1 took in the subject He was 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 29 

and much beyond reason, provoked by my failures in 
r»,ases where success could not have been expected ; but 
in the main his method was right, and it succeeded. 
I do not believe that any scientific teaching ever was 
more thorough, or better fitted for training the 
faculties, than the mode in which logic and political 
economy were taught to me by my father. Striving, 
even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the 
activity of my faculties, by making me find out 
everything for myself, he gave Lis explanations not 
before, but after, I had felt the full force of the 
difficulties; and not only gave me an accurate 
knowledge of th( subjects, as far as they 

were then undei . but made me a thinker on 

both. 1 tl for myself almost from the first, and 

occasionally thought differently from him, though lor 
a long time only on minor points, and making his 
opinion the ultimate standard At a later period I even 
occasionally convinced hini, and altered his opinion on 
some points of detail : which I state to his honour, 
not my own. It at once exemplifies his perfect can- 
dour, and the real worth of his method of teaching. 

At this point concluded what can properly be 
called my lessons : when I was about fourteen I left 
England for more than a year ; and after my return, 
though my studies went on under my father's general 
direction, he was no longer my schoolmaster. I shall 
therefore pause here, and turn buck to matters of a 



30 CHILDHOOD AXD EARLY EDUCATION. 

more general nature connected with the part of my 
life and education included in the preceding reminis- 
cences. 

In the course of instruction which I have par- 
tially retraced, the point most superficially ap- 
parent is the great effort to give, during the 
of childhood an amount of knowledge in what . 
considered the higher branches of education, which is 
seldom acquired (if acquired at all) until the 
manhood. The result of the experiment shows the 
ease with which this may be doi in a 

strong light the wretched \ \ many precious 

years as aiv spent in acquiring til tin 

and Greek commonly taught I : a wa 

which has led so many educational reformers to 
entertain the ill-judged proposal of disc 
languages altogether from general edu If I 

had been by nature extremely quick ofappr >n, 

or had possessed a very are;; Ive 

memory, or were of a remarkal >ly act ive and tic 

character, the trial would not he conclusive ; but in all 
these natural gifts I am rather below than above par; 
what I could do, could assuredly be done 1 
boy or girl of average capacity and heal al ; 

constitution: and if 1 have accomplished ai ;. I 

owe it, among other fortunate circuu the 

fact that through the early training 1 me 

by my father, 1 started, I may fairly Bay, with an 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 31 

advantage of a quarter of a century over my con- 
temporaries. 

There was one cardinal point in tliis training, of 
which I have already given some indication, and 
which, more than anything else, was the cause 
of whatever good it effected. Most boys or youths 
who have had much knowledge drilled into them, 
have their mental capacities not strengthened, 
but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere 
facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other 
people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the 
power to form opinions of their own : and thus the 
sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in 
their education, so often grow up mere parroters of 
what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds 
except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, how- 
ever, was not an education of cram. My father 
never permitted anything which I learnt to de- 
generate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove 
to make the understanding not only go along with 
i every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. 
; Anything which could be found out by thinking I 
! never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to 
find it out for myself. As far as I can trust my 
remembrance, I acquitted myself very lamely in this 
department ; my recollection of such matters is 
almost wholly of failures, hardly ever of success. It 
is true the failures were often in things in which 



32 CHILDHOOD AXD EARLY EDUCATION. 

success in so early a stage of my progress, was 
almost impossible. I remember at some time in my 
thirteenth year, on my happening to use the word 
idea, he asked me what an idea was ; and e 
some displeasure at my ineffectual efforts to define 
the word: I recollect also his indigm it my 

using the common expression that something v> 
true in theory but required correction in practice; 
and how, after making me vainly strive to define the 
word theory, he explained its meaning, and showed 
the fallacy of the vulgar form of speech which I had 
used; leaving me fully persuaded that in being 
unable to give a correct definition of Theory, and in 
speaking of it as something which might be at 
variance with practice, I had shown unparalleled 
ignorance. In this he seems, and perha ry 

unreasonable; but I think, only in bei at 

my failure. A pupil from whom not] 3 ever 

demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can. 

One of the evils most liable to 
of earl j proficiency, and which often fatally blighta 
its promise, my father most anxiously guarded 
against. Tins was self-conceit. He kept rue, with 
extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearii self 

praised, or of being led to make self-flattering 
parisons between myself and others. From his 
intercourse with me I could derive none but a very 
humble opinion of myself; and the standard 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION 38 

parison he always held up to me, was not what other 
people did, but what a man could and uttglit to do. 
He completely succeeded in preserving me from the 
sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at 
all aware that my attainments were anything un- 
usual at my age. If I accidentally had my attention 
drawn to the fact that some other boy knew less 
than myself — which happened less often than might 
be imagined — I concluded, not that I knew much, but 
that he, for some reason or other, knew little, or that 
his knowledge was of a different kind from mine. 
My state of mind was not humility, but neither was 
it arrogance. I never thought of saying to myself, 
I am, or I can do, so and so. I neither estimated 
myself highly nor lowly : I did not estimate myself 
at all. If I thought anything about myself, it 
was that I was rather backward in my studies, 
since I always found myself so, in comparison 
with what my father expected from me. I assert 
this with confidence, though it was not the impression 
of various persons who saw me in my childhood. 
They, as I have since found, thought me greatly 
and disagreeably self-conceited ; probably because 
I was disputatious, and did not scruple to give 
direct contradictions to things which I heard said. 
I suppose I acquired this bad habit from having 
been encouraged in an unusual degree to talk on 
matters beyond my age, and with grown persons, 

D 



34 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 

while I never had inculcated on me the vteual respect 
for them. My father did not correct this ill-breeding 
and impertinence, probably from not being aware of 
it, for I was always too much in awe of him to be 
otherwise than extremely subdued and quiet in his 
presence. Yet with all this I had no notion of any 
superiority in myself; and well was it for me that I 
had hot. I remember the very place in Hyde Park 
where, in my fourteenth year, on the eve of 1 
my fathers house for a long . la* told me that 

I should find, as [got acquainted with new people, 
that I had been taught many things which youths of 
my age did n<>t commonly know; and t] 
persons would be disposed to I of thi 

in compliment mo upon it. AVI er things lie 

said on tliis topic T remember very imperfectly ; hut 
he wound uj> by saying, that whatever I 
than others, could not be ascribed t<> any merit in 
me, hut to the very unusual advantage which had 
fallen to my lot, of having a father who 
to teach me, and willing to give the i ry trouble 

and time ; that it was no matter ot' \ if I 

knew more than those who had not had a similar ad- 
vantage, hut the deepest disgrace to mo it' I did net. I 
have a distinct remembrance, that the suggestion tl 
for the first time made to me, that I knew more than 
other youths who were considered well educated, wj - 
to me a piece of Information, to which, as to all other 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 35 

things which my father told me, I gave implicit 
credence, but which did not at all impress me as a 
personal matter. I felt no disposition to glorify 
myself upon the circumstance that there were other 
persons who did not know what I knew ; nor had I 
ever flattered myself that my acquirements, whatever 
they might be, were any merit of mine : but, now 
when my attention was called to the subject, I felt 
that what my father had said respecting my peculiar 
advantages was exactly the truth and common sense 
of the matter, and it fixed my opinion and feeling 
from that time forward. 

It is evident that this, among many other of the pur- 
poses of my fathers scheme of education, could not 
have been accomplished if he had not carefully kept 
me from having any great amount of intercourse with 
other boys. He was earnestly bent upon my escaping 
not only the corrupting influence which boys exercise 
over boys, but the contagion of vulgar modes of 
thought and feeling ; and for this he was willing 
that I should pay the price of inferiority in the 
accomplishments w r hich schoolboys in all countries 
chiefly cultivate. The deficiencies in my education 
were principally in the* things which boys learn from 
being turned out to shift for themselves, and from 
being brought together in large numbers. From 
temperance and much walking, I grew up healthy 
and hardy, though not muscular ; but I could do no 

D 2 



36 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 



feats of skill or physical strength, and knew none i f 

the ordinary bodily exercises. It wa that pi 

or time for it, was refused rne. Though no h< 

were allowed, lest the habit of v should l>e 

broken, and a taste for idle quired, I had am] 

leisure in every day to amuse myself; 1 

no boy companions, and the animal I 

activity was satisfied by walking, my ami. ts, 

which were mostly solitary, of a qui 

if not a bookish turn, and gave little stimuli 

other kind even of mental ai than that which v. 

already called i <»rtl i by my studies: I consequently 

remained long, and in a 1< 

remained, inexpert in an; 

dexterity ; my mind, as well as my hands, did 

work very lamely when it was appli ght to 

have been applied, to the al detail- which, 

they are the chief i life to the majority of 

men, are also the things in which whatever menl 

capacity they have, chiefly 1 v 

constantly meriting reproof by inatl 

vance, and general slackness of mind b 

daily life. My lather was the extreme in 

these particulars : his 

were always on the alert; he carried 

energy of character in his whole mann< 

every action of life : and this 

tributed to the strong impression which he al 



CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION. 37 

made upon those with whom he came into personal 
contact. But the children of energetic parents, fre- 
quently grow up unenergetic, because they lean on 
their parents, and the parents are energetic for them. 
The education which my father gave me, was in 
itself much more fitted for training me to know than 
to do. Not that he was unaware of my deficiencies ; 
both as a boy and as a youth I was incessantly 
smarting under his severe admonitions on the 
subject. There was anything but insensibility or 
tolerance on his part towards such shortcomings : 
but, while he saved me from the demoralizing effects 
of school life, he made no effort to provide me with 
any sufficient substitute for its practicalizing in- 
fluences. Whatever qualities he himself, probably, 
had acquired without difficulty or special training, 
he seems to have supposed that I ought to acquire 
as easily. He had not, I think, bestowed the same 
amount of thought and attention on this, as on most 
other branches of education ; and here, as well in 
some other points of my tuition, he seems to have 
expected i Beets without causes. 



CHAPTER II. 



MORAL INFLUENCES IX EABLY FOUTtt MY FATli. 
CHARACTER AND OPINIO 



/" 



TN my education, as in tliat of everyone, the moral 
influences, which are bo much more important 
than all others, are also the mod complicated, and the 
most difficult to specify with anj approach I 
pleteness. Withoul attempting the hope] 
detailing the crircuinstanees by whieh, in tl 
my early character may hai d, I Bhafl 

confine myself to a few leading points, which t'^mi an 

indispensable part of any true account of my educa- 
tion, 

I was brought up from the first without any re- 
ligious belief, in the ordinary acc< 
My father, educated in the creed of Scotch V 
byterianism, had by his own studies and reflect] 
been early led to reject not only the belief in I 
lation, but the foundations of what iscommoi led 

Natural Religion. 1 have heard him say. that i 
turning point of his mind on the subject was read] 
Butler's Analogy. That work, of which he alwi 
continued to speak with respect, kept him, as he 



MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. 39 

said, for some considerable time, a believer in the 
divine authority of Christianity ; by proving to him, 
that whatever are the difficulties in believing that 
the Old and New Testaments proceed from, or record 
the acts of, a perfectly wise and good being, the same 
and still greater difficulties stand in the way of the 
belief, that a beingr of such a character can have been 
the Maker of the universe. He considered Butler's 
argument as conclusive against the only opponents 
for whom it was intended. Those who admit an 
omnipotent as well as perfectly just and benevolent 
maker and ruler of such a world as this, can say 
little against Christianity but what can, with at least 
equal force, be retorted against themselves. Finding, 
therefore, no halting place in Deism, he remained in 
a state of perplexity, until, doubtless after many 
struggles, he yielded to the conviction, that, concern- 
ing the origin of things nothing whatever can be 
known. This is the only correct statement of his 
opinion ; for dogmatic atheism he looked upon as 
absurd ; as most of those, whom the world has con- 
sidered Atheists, have always done. These parti- 
culars are important, because they show that my 
fathers rejection of all that is called religious belief, 
was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter 
of logic and evidence : the grounds of it were moral, 
still more than intellectual. He found it impossible 
to believe that a world so full of evil was the work 



40 MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. 

of an Author combining infinite power with perfect 
goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned 
the subtleties by which men attempt to blind them- 
selves to this open contradiction- The Babe 
Manichsean theory of a Good and an Evil Principle, 
struggling against each other for the governm 
the universe, he would not have equally condemn* 
and I have heard him ex] uprise, thai no one 

revived it in our time He would have regarded it 
as a mere hypothesis ; but he would have a 
; it no depraving influence. As H was, his a 
to religion, in I he sense usually a1 I to the term, 

was of the same kind wii h th 
regarded it with the feelings dm to a n 

mental delusion, but I l evil, lb- 

looked upon it as tin- :ny of morale 

first, by setting up tietitious e\e< T. l"u*t" in 

creeds, devotional feelings, and oearemoi 

nected with the good of human-kind, and c 

those to be accepted ubetitutes foi 

virtues: but above all. by radically vita the 

standard of morals j making it consist in doing the 

will of a being, on whom it lavish* [ all the 

phrases of adulation, but whom b r truth it 

depicts as eminently hateful. 1 have a hundred 

times heard him say, that all 

have represented their gods as wieked. in I 

Bt&ntly increasing pi cm, that mankind I 



MORAL INFLUENCES IN EABLY YOUTH. 41 

gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the 
most perfect conception of wickedness which the 
human mind can devise, and have called this God, 
and prostrated themselves before it. This ne plus 
ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in 
what is commonly presented to mankind as the 
creed of Christianity. Think (he used to say) of a 
being who would make a Hell — who would create 
the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, 
and therefore with the intention, that the great 
majority of them were to be consigned to horrible 
and everlasting torment. The time, I believe, is 
drawing near when this dreadful conception of an 
object of worship will be no longer identified with 
Christianity; and when all persons, with any sense 
of moral good and evil, will look upon it with 
the same indignation with which my father regarded 
it. My father \ wall aware as any one that 

Christians do not, in general, undergo the demora- 
lizing consequences which seem inherent in such a 
creed, in the manner or to the extent which might 
have been expected from it. The same slovenliness 
of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, 
wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a 
theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents 
them from perceiving the logical consequences of the 
theory. Such is the facility with which mankind 
believe at one and the same time tilings inconsistent 



42 MORAL INFLUENCES IX EARLY YOVTH. 

with one another, and so few are * draw 

from what they receive as truths, any i 

but those recommended to them by t 

that multitudes have held the undoubting belief 

an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and 1 

identified that being with the b d they 

were able to form < ► t * j » « - 1 1; - . - r -• h 

was not paid to the demon which such a Beii _r as 
they Imagined would really be, bu1 to their own id< 1 
of excellence. The evil is, tJ belief keeps 

the ideal wretchedly low; and op] mo6t 

obstinate resistance to all thought whi - a 

tendency to raise it 1)' >ra 

every (rain of ideas \\hi<h would I a 

clear conception and i rd of i 

eellelire, Uvause tl V do I 

distinctly hat such a si 

with many oi % the (lisp. 

much of what they are 1 to o as the 

Christian creed. And thus morality 
matter oi' blind tradition, with princi] 

nor even anv consistent feeling, to guide it. 
It would have been wholly U 

father's ideas of duty, to allow quire : - 

pressions contrary to his oonvicti i 
respecting religion : and he impressed upon i 

the first, that the manner in whieh the w me 

into existence was a sulyect on which nothi] 



MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. 43 

known : that the question, " Who made me ?" cannot 
be answered, because we have no experience or 
authentic information from which to answer it ; and 
that any answer only throws the difficulty a step 
further hack, since the question immediately presents 
If. "Who made God ?' He, at the same time, took 
care that I should 1"' 8 quainted with what had been 
thought by mankind ou these impenetrable problems. 
I have mentioned at how early an age la* made me a 

iderofeocl >ryj and he taught me to 

take the b in the Reformation, as the 

tnd decisive cunt* inst priestly tyranny for 

liberty of thought. 

I am thus one of the very few examples, in this 

country, of one who Ins. not thrown off religious 

belief, but never had it: I grew up in a negative 

1 to it. I looked upon the modern 

ictly as I did upon the ancient religion, as some- 
thing which in no way concerned me. It did not 
seem to me more strange that English people should 
believe what I did not, than that the men I read of 
in Berodotus should have done so. History had 
made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact 
familiar to me, and this was but a prolongation of 
that fact This point in my early education had, 
however, incidentally one bad consequence deserving 
notice. In giving me an opinion contrary to that of 
the world, my father thought it necessary to give it 



44 MORAL INFLUENCES IX EAIiLY YOUTH. 

as one which could not prudently be av to the 

world. This lesson of keeping my th 

myself, at that early age, was al :ne 

mora] disadvantages; though my limited b .rse 

with straj cially e 

to me on religion, pi I in 

the alternal ii -il or 1. 1 rememl 

two occasions iii my boyhood, on which I felt i 

in this altci i and in both Cases I 

disbelief and defended it. liy oj 

considerably older than myself: one of them I 

certainly E 

never renewed b was si 

prised and . did 

convince me for some time, wi1 

The greal advance in 
is one of the mosl important differs aces 
present time and my childhood, has grea' 

altered the moralil ' this qu< ink 

that few men ^[' my father's intelf I public spirit, 

holding with such intensity of mora] d as lie 

did, unpopular opinions on i 

(A 1 the great subjects of thought, woul I 

practise or inculcate the Withholding of them from 

the world, unless in th< 

day, in which frankness on these subj< idd 

either risk the loss of i dd 

amount to exclusion from sphere 



MORAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY YOUTH. 45 

peculiarly suitable to the capacities of the individual. 
On religion in particular the time appears to me to 
have come, when it is the duty of all who being 
qualified in point of knowledge, have on mature con- 
sideration themselves that the current 
opinion- are not only false but hurtful, to make their 
sent known; at least, if they are among those 
who tion or reputation, gives their opinion a 
chance of bein Lded to. Such an avowal would 
put an end, i and for ever, to the vulgar 
prejudice, that what is called, very improperly, 
unbelief, is connected with any bad qualities either 
of mind or h The world would be astonished if 
it knew ho proportion of its brightest orna- 
ments— of those mod distinguished even in popular 
for wisdom and virtue— are complete 

BOeptics in religion; many of them refraining from 

avowal, less from personal considerations, than from 
a conscientious, though now in my opinion a most 
mistaken apprehension, lesi by speaking out what 

would tend to weaken existing beliefs, and by con- 
sequence (as they suppose) existing restraints, they 
should do harm instead of good. 

Of unbelii 90 called) as well as of believers, 

there are many 8] including almost every variety 

of moral type. But the best among them, as no one 
who has had opportunities of really knowing them 
will hesitate to affirm, are more genuinely religious, 



46 MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS, 

in the best sense of the word religion, than th 
who exclusively arrogate to themselves the til 
The liberality of the age, or in other words the 
weakening of the obstinate prejudice which mal 
men unable to see what is before their eyes b* 
it is contrary to their expectations, has caused it to 
very commonly admitted that a Dei-t may be 
truly religious: bu< if n-l;_ or any graces 

of character and nol for mere d assert] 

may equally ho made of many whose belief is far 
short <>f Deism. Th<>n;_;h they may think the pi 
incomplete thai the universe is a work of design, 
and though they assuredly disbeli <t it c 

have an Am hor and ( nor who is 

as wvll as perfed in goodness, they have that which 
constitutes the principal worth of all re] 
ever, an ideal conception of a I which 

they habitually refer as the guide of th< ' 
and this ideal ofGood is usually tar nearer to perfec- 
tion than the objective Deity of those, who think 
themselves obliged to find absolul 
author oi f a world so crowded with 6 • aid 

so deformed by injustice as 0UI8. 

My father's moral convictions, wholly diss 
from religion, were very much of tl 
those of the Creek philosopher* delivei 

with the force and decision which C 
that came from him. Even at the very early age at 



MY FATHERS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 47 

which I read with him the Memorabilia of Xenophon, 
I imbibed from that work and from his comments a 
deep respect for the character of Socrates ; who stood 
in my mind as a model of ideal excellence : and I 
well remember how my father at that time impressed 
upon me the lesson of the " Choice of Hercules." 
At a somewhat later period the lofty moral standard 
exhibited in the writings of Plato operated upon me 
with great force. My father's moral inculcations 
were at all times mainly those of the "Soeratici^ 
viri ;" justice, temperance (to which he gave a very 
extended application erance, readiness 

to encounter pain and especially labour ; regard for 
the public good ; estimation of persons according to 
their merits, and of tilings according to their intrinsic 
usefulness; a life of exertion in contradiction to one 
of self-indulgent rase and sloth. These and other 
moralities he conveyed in brief sentences, uttered as 
occasion arose, of grave exhortation, or stern repro- 
bation and contempt. 

But though direct mora] teaching does much, in- 
direct does more; and the effect my father produced 
on my character, did not depend solely on what he 
said or did with that direct object, but also, and still 
more, on what manner of man he was. 

In his views of life he partook of the character of 
the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the 
modern but the ancient sense of the word. In his 



48 my father's character and OPI v 

personal qualities the Stoic predominated I 

indard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it 
was utilitarian, taking as I Jit 

and wrong, 1 1 produce p] 

or pain. Bi had (and this 

elemeni ) scarcely any I 
bis later years, of which alone, • 
speak confidently. I [e was able to] res; 

bat he deemed very few of worth the pri 

which, ' inthepresei ofsck: be 

paid for thcin. The • of miscarriaL 

In life, he considered to 1"' a1 ible to 

valuing of | < i s. Acoor in 

the lar aded bj I k philoe 

stopping short point of in >n in 

indulg is with him, its wi- 

the centra] poinl id- 

eations of this virtue till ■ large pla hildish 

rememfaranoea He thought bun a poor thi 

at best , after the Breshness <»f \vmh . 
curiosity had gone by. This was a on whi 

he did not often speak, lly, it : 

in the presence ol youi \ : but when I 

it was with an ai d and proi 

1 [e would Bometim* i - hat if life 
it might be,bj ment and good 

would be worth having: but h< 
thing like enth n of tl He 



MY FATHERS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 49 

never varied in rating intellectual enjoyments above 

all others, even in value as pleasures, independently of 

their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of the benevolent 

>ns he placed high in the scale ; and used to 

say, that he had never known a happy old man, 

except those who were able to live over again in the 

pleasures of the young. For passionate emotions of 

all.- tnd for everything which has been said or 

written in exaltation of them, he professed the 

• nipt. He regarded them as a form of 

madness. "The infc - with him a bye-word 

of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an 

tration of the moral standard of modern times, 

avd with i indents, the great stress 

laid upon I ■ 2 Such, he considered 

to 1 - of pi r blame. Right 

and w : good and had, he regarded as qualities 

solely of conduct— ol tnd omissions; there being 

no feeling which may not lead, and does not fre- 
quently lead, either to good <>r to had actions: 
cor self, tl re to act right, often » 

leading peop] t wrong. C *ntly carrying 

out the doctrine, that the object of praise and blame 
should be the difi ent of wrong conduct and 

the encouragement lit, he refused to let his 

praise or blame be influenced by the motive of the 
agent, lie bkm severely what he thought a 

bad action, when the motive was a feeling of duty ; 

E 



50 MY FATHERS CHARACTER AND OPINION'S. 

// as if the agents had been consciously evil rl.^rs. He 
would not h;> 

inquisitors, that they sincerely 1- bun ' 

heretics to be an obligation of ;t 

though be did n<»t allow hi of pur] 

his disapprobation oi full efl 

his estimation of characters. No one pri 
scientiousness and rectitude of intention more ] 
or was more incapable of \ a] ting in 

whom he did i 1 assi of it. Bui he 

disliked people quite as mu< 
deficiency, provided he I b illy li k 

make them ad ill. Se di i 

fanatic in any h d i or more than i 

who adopted the Bame 

because he thought him be 

practically mi I thus, his a-. 

many intellectiial errors, or wh 
such, partook, in a oeri aio e he cha] 

moral feeling. All this is nn . in 

a degree once common, bui now very unusual, tlir 
his feelings into his opi which ti 

difficull to understand how am 
much of both, can fail to do, IS 
who do not care about opinions, will 
this with intolerance. Those, who 
which they hold to be inn: :, and 

their contraries to be prodi ly luirtful, ha 



MY FATHERS CHARACTER AND OriXIOXS. 51 

any deep regard for the general good, Avill necessarily 
dislike, as a class and in the abstract, those who 
think wrong what they think right, and right what 
they think v, h they need not therefore 

he, nor was my father, insensible to good qualities in 
an opponent, n< ed in their estimation of 

individuals by one general presumption, instead ox 
by the whole of their character. I --rant that an 
r person, being no more infallible than other 

Iraen, is li people on account of opinions 

which do not merit dislike; but if he neither himself 
es them any ill ollice, - at its being 

doi, Ltoleiant : and the for- 

bearance whi oscientioufl sense of 

the iin: ;* the equal freedom of 

all opinions, is the only tol which is com- 

mendable, or, to the highest moral order of minds, 
'Me. 

It will be admitted, that a man of the opinions, 
and the char scribed, was likely to 

leave i mural impression on any mind 

principally formed by him, and that his moral 
teaching to err on the side of laxity 

or indulgence. The element which was chiefly 
deficient in his moral relation to his children was 
that of tenderness. I do not believe that this 
deficiency lay in his own nature. I believe him to 
have had much more feeling than he habitually 

E 2 






52 my father's character and opinio: 

showed, and much greater capacities of feeling tl 

were ever developed. He resembled most E 

I! men in being ashamed of t 1 f feeling, and by 

the absence of demonstration, starving the 1 

themselves. If we consider further that I 3 in 

the trying position of sol< 1 add to i 

that his temper was constitutionally irritabL 

impossible not to feel true pity for a who did, 

and strove to do, so much for his children, i uld 

have so valued their affection, jei who mue 

been constant! y feeling thai i him was dryi 

it up at its s<»uree. This was no ie case 

later in life, and with Ins younger childrea T 

loved him tenderly : and if I cann< 

myself, 1 was always loyally d< to him- A< 

regards my own education, I h< 

whether I was more a loser or gainer by Ins 

severity, It was not such as to prevent m< 

having a happy childhood And 1 do not beli< 

that hoys can he indueed to apply themselves with 

vigour, and what i^> so much more difficult, p 

ranee, to dry and irksome studies, by the boL 

of persuasion and Boft words, Much musl 

and much must ho learnt, by children, for which ri 

... 
discipline, and known liability to punishment, 

indispensable as means. It i-, no doul 

laudable effort, in modern teaching 

much as possible of what the young are required to 



MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 53 

learn, easy and interesting to them. But when this 
principle is pushed to the length of not requiring 
them to learn anything but what has been made easy 
and interesting, one of the chief objects of education 
is sacrificed. I rejoice in the decline of the old 
brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which, 
however, did succeed in enforcing habits of applica- 
tion ; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up 
a race of men who will be incapable of doing any- 
thing which is disagreeable to them. I do not, then, 
believe that fear, as an element in education, can be 
dispensed with ; but I am sure that it ought not to 
be the main element ; and when it predominates so 
much as to preclude iovie and confidence on the part 
of the child to those who should be the unreservedly 
trusted advisers of years, and perhaps to seal 

up the fountains of frank and spontaneous communi- 
cativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for which 
a large abatement must be made from the benefits, 
moral and intellectual, which may flow from any 
other part of the education. 

During this first period of my life, the habitual 
frequenters of my fathers house were limited to a 
very few persons, most of them little known to the 
world, but whom personal worth, and more or less of 
congeniality with at least his political opinions (not 
so frequently to be met with then as since) inclined 
him to cultivate ; and his conversations with them I 



54 my father's character and opinions, 

listened to with interest and instruction. My be* 

an habitual inmate of my fathers study me 

acquainted with the i of his fri 

Jticardo, who by his 

kindliness of manner, was y. to yoi 

persons, and who I te a s of 

political economy, invited me to his house i 

walk with him in order to c • on the subj( 

I was a more freqn L8 17 or 

181 s) to Mr, 1 lun: m in tl of 

Scotland as my I 

think, b j d of 

his, had on returning tV I ith- 

ful acquaintance, and \ 

greatly unde I ice of i 

and energy oi 

influen go into Pa 

line of conduct which n hon< 

place in the history of his i 

I saw much more, owing to ; timacy which 

existed between him and my father. 1 know* 

how soon after my fa: 

they became acquainted But my was the 

earliest Englishman rk, wl 

thoroughly understood, and in the main 
Bentham's general view b 

law : and this was a natural foundati 

between them, and made them lamiliar com] 



MY FATHERS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 55 

in a period of Bentham's life during which he ad- 
mitted much fewer visitors than was the case 
subsequently. At this time Mr. Bentham passed 
some part of every year at Barrow Green House, in 
a beautiful part of the Surrey Hills, a few miles from 
Godstone, and there I each summer accompanied my 
father in a long visit. In 1813 Mr. Bentham, my 
father, and I made an excursion, which included 
Oxford, Bath and Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and 
Portsmouth- In this journey I saw many things 
which were instructive to me, and acquired my first 
taste for natural scenery, in the elementary form of 
fondness for a k> \i< . In the succeeding winter we 
moved into a house very near Mr. Bentham's, which 
my father rented from him, in Queen Square, 
Westminster. From 1814 to 1817 Mr. Bentham lived 
during half of each year at Ford Abbey, in Somerset- 
shire (or rather in a part of Devonshire surrounded 
by Somersetshire), which intervals I had the advantage 
of passing at thai place. This sojourn was, I think, 
an important circumstance in my education. Nothing 
contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments 
in a people, than the large and free character of their 
habitations. The middle-age architecture, the baronia 1 
hall, and the spacious and lofty rooms, of this fine old 
place, so unlike the mean and cramped externals cf 
English middle class life, gave the sentiment of a 
larger and freer existence, and were to me a sort of 



56 my father's character and opr 

poetic cultivation, aided also by the chai 

grounds in which the Ahb- ■ 1: which 

and secluded, umbr \ and full of I of 

falling waters. 

I owed another of tl - in 

my education, a rice in V: Mr. 

Bentham's brother, General 811 Samuel I 

had seen Sir Samuel Bentt 
house near Gosport in the 
mentioned (he ben d Superu 

Dockyard at Portsmouth), and du 
days which they m :d Abl 

the peace, befon to liv< 

i B20 they in\ Lted me I 

in the South of Fi which their kii 

ultimately pr 1 to m 

Samuel Bentham, though of a i 
different from that of his ill- 
man of \nv considerable 

powers, with a decided genii 

His wife, a daughter of tl mist, I 

Fordyce, was a woman ol 

character, much general knowledg 

ticaJ good sense of the Edgeworth kind : she was the 

ruling spirit of the household 

was well qualified, to be T ne 

son (the eminent botanist) and thre< the 

youngest about I I 



MY FATHER'S CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 57 

to them for much and various instruction, and for an 
almost parental interest in my welfare. When I first 
joined them, in May 1820, they occupied the Chateau 
of Pompignan (still belonging to a descendant of 
Voltaire's enemy) on the heights overlooking the 
plain of the Garonne between Montauban and 
Toulouse. I accompanied them in an excursion to 
the Pyrenees, including a stay of some duration at 
Bagn&res de Bigorre, a journey to Pan, Bayonne, and 

.meres de Luchon, and an ascent of the Pic du 
Midi de Bigorre. 

This first introduction to the highest order of 
mountain Bceneiy made the deepest impression on 
me, and gave a colour to my tastes through life. 
In October we proceeded by the beautiful mountain 
route of Castres and St. Pons, from Toulouse to Mont- 
pellier, in which last neighbourhood Sir Samuel had 
just bought tlit 1 of Restincli&re, near the foot 

of the singular mountain of St. Loup. During this 
residence in France I acquired a familiar knowledge 
of the French language, and acquaintance with the 
ordinary French literature ; I took lessons in 
various bodily exercises, in none of which however I 
made any proficiency ; and at Montpellier I attended 
the excellent winter courses of lectures at the Faculte 
des Sciences, those of M. Anglada on chemistry, 
of M. Provencal on zoology, and of a very ac- 
complished representative of the eighteenth century 



58 my father's character And opinions. 

metaphysics, M. Gergonne, on logic, under the name 

of Philosophy of the Sciencea I also went jh a 

course of the higher mathem r the priv; 

tuition of M. Lenth&ic, a prof BSOI 

Montpellier. But the grej 

advantages which I owed to I 

education, \\;is that of having bn I for a wh 

year, the free and g( i IaJ i 

life. This advai I thou 

I could not then estimi 

feel it. I l.i\ ing bo lit i le i 

and the few people Ik' 

public objects, <•!" a 1 ; lly disi 

kind, at hrarl , I \ 

what , in England, is called the hal 

indeed professing, but t. 

ofimplication, that oond ■■ alwaj 

towards low and petty obj 

feelings which manifests itself bj 

tion iA' all demons^ - of th 

abstinence p< among a - 

iigionists) from profi i princi 

at all, except in those preoi in whic 

profession is put on as part of t 

malities of the n. I could not then hi 

ov estimate the 

existence, and that i ch, wh 

faults, if equally w 



MY FATHERS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 59 

among whom sentiments, which by comparison at 
least may be called elevated, are the current coin of 
human intercourse, both in books and in private life ; 
and though often evaporating in profession, are yet 
kept alive in the nation at large by constant exercise, 
and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a living 
and active part of the existence of great numbers of 
persons, and to be recognised and understood by all. 
Neither could I then appreciate the general culture of 
the understanding, which results from the habitual 

rcise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into 
the mosi uneducated classes of several countries on 
the Continent, in a degree not equalled in England 
among the so-called educated, except where an 
unusual tenderness of conscience loads to a habitual 

rcise of the intellect on questions of right and 
wrong. I did not know the way in which, among the 
ordinary English, the absence of interest in things of 
an unselfish kind, i occasionally in a special 

thing here and there, and the habit of not speaking 
to others, nor much even to themselves/ about the 
things in which they do feel interest, causes both their 
feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain unde- 
veloped, or to develope themselves only in some single 
and very limited direction ; reducing them, considered 
as spiritual beings, to a kind of negative existence. 
All these things I did not perceive till long after- 
wards ; but I even then felt, though without stating 



60 MY FATHEK'8 CHARACTER AND OPE 

it clearly to myself, the contra the fra 

sociability and amiability of i 

course, arid the English m in which 

everybody acts as it* everybody els 

no exceptions) was either an enemy or a 1 

France, it is true, the 1 well i »od 

points, both of individual and of national i 

coino more to the surface, and bn it mon 

lessly in ordinary intercourse, than in 1. I : l»ut 

the general hahit «.f the people ifl BUB w«-ll OS 

to expect, friendly feeling in e wards 

other, where ver there is not some p< ise for 

the opposite In England it is only of the beet bi 
people, in the upp 
anj t bing like this ran 1 

In my way through I ' im* 

Ulg, 1 passed BOme time in the h M. S 

eminent political e< who was a friend i 

correspondent of my father, having be ;io- 

quainted with him on a visit or 

two after the peace. He v 

period of the French 1 1 Ion, a I 

the best kind of French Republican, < 

had never bent the knee to B 

courted by him to d a truly upright, 1 

enlightened man. He lived a qui 

lite, made happy by warm a, publi 

private. He was piainted with mai.\ 



MY FATHERS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 61 

chiefs of the Liberal party, and I saw various note- 
worthy persons while staying at his house ; among 
whom I have pleasure in the recollection of having 
once seen Saint-Simon, not yet the founder either of 
a philosophy or a religion, and considered only as a 
clever original. The chief fruit which I carried away 
from the society I saw, was a strong and permanent 
interest in Continental Liberalism, of which I ever 
afterwards kept myself au courant, as much as of 
English politics : a thing not at all usual in those days 
with Englishmen, and whieh had a very salutary in- 
fluence on my development, keeping me free from the 
error always prevalent in England, and from which even 
in \ father with all hid superiority to prejudice was not 
■mpt, of judging universal questions by a merely 
English standard After passing a few weeks at 
Caen with an old friend of my father's, I returned to 
England in July 1821 ; and my education resumed 
its ordinary course. 



CHAPTER III 



LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, AND II i 
BELF-BD1 CATION. 

l^OPt the first year or two after my vifiii bo I 

I continued my old Btudies, with the additi 
of some new ones. When [ rei 
just finishing foi al 

Economy, and he made me | on 

the manuscript , \\ hich Mr. i •• all 

his own writings, maki] 

contents ;" a Bhorl 

enable the writer more easily t I impro 

the order of the idea-, and the _ I he 

exposition. Seen after, my father put ii. 
Condillac's Traits des Sensati 
metaphysical volumes of his ( Sours dTEtud 
(notwithstanding the superficial resembL 
Condillac's psychological system a 
quite as much for a warning as for an example. I am 
not sure whether it was in this winter or th 
thai I first read a history of the French Revoluti 

] learnt with astonishment, that the princi] 
democracy, then apparently in so U 



LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION. 63 

hopeless a minority everywhere in Europe, had borne 
all before them in France thirty years earlier, and had 
been the creed of the nation. As may be supposed 
from this, I had previously a very vague idea of that 
great commotion. I knew only that the French had 
thrown off the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. 
and XV., had put the King and Queen to death, 
guillotined many persons, one of whom was Lavoisier, 
and had ultimately fallen under the despotism of 
Bonaparte. From this time, as was natural, the 
Bubjecl took an immense hold of my feelings. It 
allied itself with all my juvenile aspirations to the 
character of a democratic champion. What had 
happened so lately, Beemed as if it might easily happen 
again : and the most transcendent glory I was capable 
of conceiving, was that of figuring, successful or un- 
successful, as a Girondist in an English Convention. 

During tho winter of 1821-2, Mr. John Austin, with 
whom at the time of my visit to France my father 
had but lately become acquainted, kindly allowed me 
to read I toman law with him. My father, notwith- 
standing his abhorrence of the chaos of barbarism 
called English Law, had turned his thoughts towards 
the bar as on the whole less ineligible for me than 
any other profession : and these readings with Mr. 
Austin, who had made Bentham's best ideas his own, 
and added much to them from other sources and from 
his own mind, were not only a valuable introduction to 



G4 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

legal studies, but an important portion of general 
education. With Mr. Austin I read Heineccius on 
the Institutes, his Roman Antiquities, and part of 
his exposition of the Pandects ; to which was added 
a considerable portion of Blackstone. It was at the 
commencement of these studies that my father, as a 
needful accompaniment to them, put into my hands 
Bentham's principal speculations, as interpreted to 
the Continent, and indeed to all the world, by 
Dumont, in the Traite de Legislation. The reading ■ .of 
this book was an epoch in my life ; one of the 
turning points in my mental history. 

My previous education had been, in a certain 
sense, already a course of Benthamism. The Ben- 
thamic standard of " the greatest happiness " was 
that which I had always been taught to apply; I 
was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, 
forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on 
Government, written by my father on the Platonic 
model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst 
upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus 
impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham 
passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning 
in morals and legislation, deduced from 2}hrases like 
"law of nature," " right reason," " the moral sense," 
" natural rectitude," and the like, and characterized 
them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its senti- 
ments upon others under cover of sounding expressions 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 65 

which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set 
up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not 
struck me before, that Bentham s principle put an 
end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that 
all previous moralists were superseded, and that 
here indeed was the commencement of a new era in 
thought. This impression was strengthened by the 
manner in which Bentham put into scientific form 
the application of the happiness principle to the 
morality of actions, by analysing the various classes 
and orders of their consequences. But what struck 
me at that time most of all, was the Classification 
of Offences, which is much more clear, compact 
and imposing in Dumont's redaction than in the 
original work of Bentham from which it was taken. 
Logic and the dialectics of Plato, which had formed 
so large a part of my previous training, had given me 
a strong relish for accurate classification. This taste 
had been strengthened and enlightened by the study 
of botany, on the principles of what is called the 
Natural Method, which I had taken up with great 
zeal, though only as an amusement, during my stay 
in France ; and when I found scientific classification 
applied to the great and complex subject of Punish- 
able Acts, under the guidance of the ethical principle 
of Pleasurable and Painful Consequences, followed 
out in the method of detail introduced into these 
subjects by Bentham, I felt taken up to an eminence 

F 



66 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

from which I could survey a vast mental domain, and 
see stretching out into the distance in1 
results beyond all computation. As I proc 
further, there seemed to be added to this intell 
clearness, the most inspiring pr a of pr 

improvement in human affaira T<» B _ r.tl 

view of the construction of a body of law I * 
altogether a stranger, bavins read with att 
that admirable compendium, my fathers art i 
Jurisprudence: but I had read it with little pr 
and scarcely any Interest, no doubt from i* 
tremely general and absl 
because it concerned the form more than ( 
substance of , the logic rather th 

the ethics of law, Bui Bentham'fl ' 

lation, of which Jurisprudence is only the 
and at every page he seemed t<> 
broader conception of what human opii 
institutions ought to be, how they mig 
what they ought to be, and how tar removi i it 

they now are. When I laid down the 
of the Traite, I had become a different 
The Cf principle of utility" understood as Bentb 
understood it, and applied in the manner in which 
he applied it through these three volumes, fell 
exactly into its plaee as the keystone which 1, 
together the detached and fragmentary com] 
parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave un 



AND FIUST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 67 

to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions ; a 
creed, a doctrine, a philosophy ; in one among the 
best senses of the word, a religion ; the inculcation 
and diffusion of which could be made the principal 
outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand concep- 
tion laid before me of changes to be effected in the 
condition of mankind through that doctrine. The 
Traite de Legislation wound up with what was to 
me a most impressive picture of human life as it 
would be made by such opinions and such laws as 
were recommended in the treatise. The anticipa- 
tions of practicable improvement were studiously 
moderate, deprecating and discountenancing as 
reverie- of vague enthusiasm many things which will 
one day seem so natural to human beings, that in- 
justice will probably be done to those who once 
thought them chimerical ]>ut, in my state of mind, 
this appearance of superiority to illusion added to 
the effect which Bentham's doctrines produced on 
me, by heightening the impression of mental power, 
and the vista of improvement which he did open 
was sufficiently large and brilliant to light up my 
life, as well as to give a definite shajoe to my aspira- 
tions. 

After this I read, from time to time, the most im- 
portant of the other works of Bentham which had 
then seen the light, either as written by himself or 
as edited by Dumont. This was my private reading : 

F 2 



68 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

while, under my father's direction, my studies wi 

carried into the higher brand 

logy. I now read Locke's Est 

account of it, consisting of a com] 

every chapter, with such n me: 

which was read by, or(] think) to, my fal 

cussed throughout I p rform< it K 

Helvetiusde L'Esprit, which I read of my own 

This prepared ion of abe 

censorship, was of greal service to me, bycompelli 

precision in conceiving and expn 

duct rines, whei her a I as I nil 

as the opinion of <>t I r I [< 1 my fat! 

made me s< udy w hat I really n 

production in the philosophy of mh 

Observations on M;m. This book, though it did i 

like the Traitd de \j jisl to 

my existence, made a very similar imj me in 

regard to its immediate subject Haiti- 

tion, incomplete as in many poini . of the more 

complex mental phenomena by the law i 

commended itself to me at once as a real analys 

and made me feel by contrast the insuffi of the 

merely verbal generahb f Condilla 

the instructive gropings and feelings abo 

logical explanations, ol Locke. It was at this 

thai my father commenced writing his Anah 

the Mind, which carried Hartley's mo 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 69 

the mental phenomena to so mucli greater length and 
depth. He could only command the concentration of 
thought necessary for this work, during the complete 
leisure of his holiday of a month or six weeks 
annually : and he commenced it in the summer of 
1822, in the first holiday he passed at Dorking; in 
which neighbourhood, from that time to the end of his 
life, with the exception of two years, he lived, as far 
as his official duties permitted, for six months of every 
year. He worked at the Analysis during several 
successive vacations, up to the year L829 when it was 
published, and allowed me to read the manuscript, 
portion by portion, as it advanced. The other prin- 
cipal Engli-h writers on mental philosophy I read as I 
felt inclined, particularly Berkeley, Humes Essays, 
Reid, Dugald Stewart and Brown on Cause and 
Effect. Browns Lectures 1 did not read until two or 
three years later, nor at that time had my father 
himself read them. 

Among the works lead in the course of this year, 
which contributed materially to my development, I 
ought to mention a book (written on the foundation 
of some of Bentham's manuscripts and published 
under the pseudonyme of Philip Beauchamp) entitled 
" Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on 
the Temporal Happiness of Mankind." This was an 
examination not of the truth, but of the usefulness 
of religious belief, in the most general sense, apart 



70 LAST STAGE 09 EDUCATK I 

from the pecnliair :iaJ I'' n; 

which, of all the parts of n concerning 

religion, is the mosi important in thi in which 

-1 belief in any relig • La feeble • 

I recarious, bu( the opinion 

and Bocial purposes almost uni and \\i 

those who tion, very generally take 

refuge in ip of the 

order of Na( ore, and the suppose 
denoe, at Least as foil of oonl i 

j to the moral Bert ' y of tin 

Christianity, if only it is as completely realized ^ 
v ery I'm le, * im to a philosophy 

ha> bern writtm I 

of t his form of belief I me 

of Philip Beanchamp had thi 
Saving been shown I 

v as put int.* my hands by hi 1 I d 

marginal analysis -t' it as I had 
of Political Economy, de 

Legislation, it v he 

searching oharacter of i -he 

i' I upon ni( 

berval of manj :he 

11 a- the n 
thought, and to in, as I my 

wc.ik arguments, hut with a g 
r >und ones, and much ^<><>d n 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 7l 

completely philosophic and conclusive treatment of 
the subject. 

I have now, I believe, mentioned all the books 
which had an; iderable effect on my early mental 

dev it. From this point I began to carry on 

my intellectual cultivation by writing still more than 
by reading. In the summer of L822 I wrote my 
first argumei] I remember very littla 

about it, that it was an attack on what I 

regarded as the aii bio prejudice, that the rich 

were, or were likely to be, Superior in moral qualities 
to the pour. My performance was entirely argumenta- 
tive, without any of the declamation which the 
subject would admit <>f, and might be expected to 
to a young writer. In that department 
however I was, and remained, very inapt. Dry 
argument was the only thing I OOuld manage, or 

(willingly attempted ; though passively I was very 
susr f all composition, whether 

in the form of poetry or oratory, which appealed to 
the feelings on any basis of reason. My father, who 
knew nothing of thi f until it was finished, was 

well satisfied, and as I learnt from others, even 
pleased with it; but, perhaps from a desire to 
- promote the e e of other mental faculties than 

the purely logical, he advised me to make my next 
exercise in composition one of the oratorical kind : 
on which suggestion, availing myself of my familiarity 



72 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

with Greek history and ideas and with the Athenian 
orators, I wrote two speeches, one an accusation, 
the other a defence of Pericles, on a supposed im- 
peachment for not marching out to fight the Lacede- 
monians on their invasion of Attica. After this I 
continued to write papers on subjects often very 
much beyond my capacity, but with great benefit 
both from the exercise itself, and from the discussions 
which it led to with my father. 

I had now also begun to converse, on gen 
subjects, with the instructed men witli whom I came 
in contact: and the opportunities of such conti 
naturally became more numerous. The two friends 
of my father from whom I derived most, and with 
whom I most associated, were Mr, Grote and Mr. 
John Austin. The acquaintance of both with my 
father was recent, but had ripened rapidly ii 
intimacy. Mr. Grote was introduced to my father 
by Mr. Ricardo, I think in 1819, (being then about 
twenty-five years old), and sought assiduously his 
society and conversation. Already a highly instructed 
man, he was yet, by the side of my father, a tyro in 
the great subjects of human opinion; but he rapidly 
seized on my fathers best ideas; and in the depart- 
ment of political opinion he made himself known 
early as J 820, by a pamphlet in defence of Radical 
Ileform, in reply to a celebrated article by Sir ■ 
Macintosh, then lately published in the Edinburgh 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 73 

Review. Mr. Grote's father, the banker, was, I 
believe, a thorough Tory, and his mother intensely 
Evangelical ; so that for his liberal opinions he was in 
no way indebted to home influences. But, unlike 
most persons who have the prospect of being rich by 
inheritance, he had, though actively engaged in the 
business of banking, devoted a great portion of time 
to philosophic studies ; and his intimacy with my 
father did much to decide the character of the next 
stage in his mental progress. Him I often visited, 
and my conversations with him on political, moral, 
and philosophical subjects gave me, in addition 
to much valuable instruction, all the pleasure and 
benefit of sympathetic communion with a man 
of the high intellectual and moral eminence which 
his life and writings have since manifested to the 
world. 

Mr. Austin, who was four or five years older than 
Mr. Grote, was the eldest son of a retired miller in 
Suffolk, who had made money by contracts during 
the war, and who must have been a man of remark- 
able qualities, as I infer from the fact that all his 
sons were of more than common ability and all 
eminently gentlemen. The one with whom we are 
now concerned, and whose writings on jurisprudence 
have made him celebrated, was for some time in the 
army, and served in Sicily under Lord William 
Bentinck. After the peace he sold his commission and 



74 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

studied for the bar, to which he had been called foi 
some time before my father knew him. He w; 
like Mr. Grote, to any extent, a pupil of my fath< 
but he had attained, by reading and thought, a 
considerable number of th< e opinions, modifi 

by his own very decided individuality of characl 
He was a man of great intellectual ; which in 

conversation appeared at their very best ; from I 
vigour and richness of ex] d with which, under 

the excitement of discussion, he was a I to 

maintain some \ Lew or other of m eral >u : 

and from an appearance of not only 
deliberate and collected will; mixed with a 
bitterness, partly derived G 
partly from the genera] _s and 

reflections. The dissatisfaction with life and the world, 
felt more or less in the present state - 
intellect by every digAmming and highly 
mind, gave inhiscasea ratlin- melanch J 
character, very natural to tli 

susceptibilities are more than proportioned to their 
active energies. For it must be said, that I 
strength of will of which his 
give such strong assuranc aided 

pally in manner. With great zeal for im- 

provement, a 

acquirements the extent of which is d by 

writings he has left, he hardly i 



AND FIRST OF SELF- EDUCATION. 75 

intellectual task of magnitude. He had so high a 
standard of what ought to be done, so exaggerated a 
sense of deficiencies in his own performances, and 
was so unable to content himself with the amount of 
elaboration sufficient for the occasion and the purpose, 
that he not only spoilt much of his work for ordinary 
use by overlabouring it, but spent so much time and 
exertion in superfluous study and thought, that when 
his task ought to have been completed, he had 
generally worked himself into an illness, without 
having half finished what he undertook. From this 
mental infirmity (of which lie is not the sole example 
among the accomplished and able men whom I have 
known), combined with liability to frequent attacks 
of disabling though not dangerous ill-health, he 
accomplished, through life, little in comparison with 
what he seemed capable of; but what he did produce 
is held in the very highest estimation by the most 
competent judges ; and, like Coleridge, he might plead 
as a set-off that he had been to many persons, 
through his conversation, a source not only of much 
instruction but of great elevation of character. On 
me his influence was most salutary. It was moral 
in the best sense. He took a sincere and kind 
interest in me, far beyond what could have been 
expected towards a mere youth from a man of his 
age, standing, and what seemed austerity of character. 
There was in his conversation and demeanour a tone 



76 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

*. 

of higdimindedness which did not show itself so much, 
if the quality existed as much, in any of the otl 
persons with whom at that time I « ted My 

intercourse with him was the more beneficial, owi 
to his being of a different mental type from all 
intellectual men whom 1 frequented, and Ik 1 from I 
first set himself decidedly against the prejudices and 
narrownesses which arc almost sure to be found in 
a young man formed by a particular mode of thought 
or a particular social circle, 

His younger brother, Charles i, of whom at 

this time and for the iK'\t year or two 1 Baw much, 
had also a great effect on me, though of a 
different description. He was but a trv. a older 

than myself, and liad then jusi Lefl the University, 
where he had Bhone with greal a man of 

intellect and a brilliant orator and converses The 
effect he produced on his Cambridge cont< i 
deserves to be accounted an historical event; for 
it may in part be traced the u 
Liberalism in general, and the Benthamic 
politico-economic form of it in particular, which 
showed itself in a portion of the more acth 
young men of the higher classes from this 
1830, The Union Debating Society, at thai ti 
the height of its reputation, WJ 
what were then thought extreme o\\ in politi - 

and philosophy, were weeklj ted, fan 



AND FIRST OF SELF- EDUCATION. 77 

with their opposites, before audiences consisting of 
the elite of the Cambridge youth : and though many 
persons afterwards of more or less note, (of whom 
Lord Macaulay is the most celebrated), gained their 
first oratorical laurels in those debates, the really 
influential mind among these intellectual gladiators 
was Charles Austin. He continued, after leaving 
the University, to be, by his conversation and per- 
sonal ascendancy, a leader among the same class of 
young men who had been his associates there ; and he 
attached me among others to his car. Through him 
I became acquainted with Macaulay, Hyde and 
Charles Villiera, Strutt (now Lord Belper), Romilly 
(now Lord Romilly and Master of the Rolls), and 
various others who subsequently figured in literature 
or politics, and among whom I heard discussions on 
many topics, as yet to a certain degree new to me. 
The influence of Charles Austin over me differed 
from that of the persons I have hitherto mentioned, 
in being not the influence of a man over a boy, but 
that of an elder contemporary. It was through him 
that I first felt myself, not a pupil under teachers, 
but a man among men. He was the first person of 
intellect whom I met on a ground of equality, 
though as yet much his inferior on that common 
ground. He was a man who never failed to impress 
greatly those with whom he came in contact, even 
when their opinions were the very reverse of his. 



78 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

The impression he gave was that of bound] 
strength, together with talents which, combin 
with such apparent force of will and c 

lncd capable of dominating the world. Th 
who knew him, whether friendly to him or n 
always anticipated that he would play a co 
part in public life, It is seldom that men produ 
bo great an immedis t by - unless th< 

in some degree, lay themselves out for it ; and lie 
did this in no ordiri I [e loved I 

and even to startle Il< knew that decision is the 
greatest element of 1 he uttered his 

opinions with all the . a Ik* could throw into 

them, never SO Well plea>< d 
anv one by their i ■ unlike his bi 

who made war M the narrower H 

tions and appli f the principles I 

professed, he. on the ry, pn I the 

Benthamio doctrines in the mosl Btartling 

of which they were - ng 

everything in them which tended t^ i 

offensive to any one's ]-; d feeli All 

which, he defended with such verve and viv !id 

carried ofl by a manner - le as w< V. as I rcil 

that he always either came off vi r divided I 

honours ofthe field It is my belief that much of the 

notion popularly I ained of the tei 

timentsof what are called Benthamites or Utilil 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 79 

had its origin in paradoxes thrown out by Charles 
Austin. It must be said, however, that his example 
was followed, hand j^ssibus cequis, by younger pro- 
selytes, and that to o litre r whatever was by anybody 
considered offensive in the doctrines and maxims of 
Benthamism, became at one time the badge of a 
small coterie of youths. All of these who had any- 
thing in them, myself among others, quickly outgrew 
this boyish vanity ; and those who had not, became 
tired of differing from other people, and gave up both 
the good and the bad part of the heterodox opinions 
they had for some time professed. 

It was in the winter of 1822-3 that I formed the 
\ plan of a little society, to be composed of young men 
agreeing in fundamental principles — acknowledging 
Utility as their standard in ethics and politics, and a 
certain number of the principal corollaries drawn from 
it in the philosophy I had accepted — and meeting 
once a fortnight to read essays and discuss questions 
conformably to the premises thus agreed on. The 
fact would hardly be worth mentioning, but for the 
circumstance, that the name I gave to the society I 
had planned was the Utilitarian Society. It was 
the first time that any one had taken the title of 
Utilitarian ; and the term made its way into the 
language, from this humble source. I did not invent 
the word, but found it in one of Gait's novels, the 
4 'Annals of the Parish/ 1 in which the Scotch clergy- 



80 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

man, of whom the book is a supposed autobio- 
graphy, is represented as warning Lis pa 
not to leave the Gospel and become utilit 
With a boys fondness for a name and a I 

seized on the word, and for some 
and others by it as a sectarian app I it 

came to be occasionally used by some ol ing 

the opinions which it wi -1 to i 

As those opinions attracted more i rm 

was repeated by si a and op] 

into rather common use just aboul I h 
those who had original] 1 down that 

along with other 

Society so called ooi first of no more t 1 

three members, one of whom, being Mr. I 
amanuensi lined for us j to hold our 

meetings in his house. T\ . I thii 

reached ten, and the in 

L826. It had thus an i 
vears and a half The chief I 

myself, over and above the t of pi in 

oral discussion, WES that of 1 
contact with several you] 
advanced than myself, I 
professed the same opinions, 1 v 
sort of leader, and Ik 
their mental prog 
who tell in my 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 81 

incompatible with those of the Society, I endeavoured 
to press into its service ; and some others I probably 
should never have known, had they not joined it. 
Those of the members who became my intimate 
companions — no one of whom was in any sense of the 
word a disciple, but all of them independent thinkers 
on their own basis — were William Eyton Tooke, son 
: of the eminent political economist, a young man of 
singular worth both moral and intellectual, lost to 
the world by an early death ; his friend William 
Ellis, an original thinker in the field of political 
economy, now honourably known by his apostolic 
exertions for the improvement of education ; George 
Graham, afterwards official assignee of the Bank- 
ruptcy Court, a thinker of originality and power on 
almost all abstract subjects ; and (from the time when 
he came first to England to study for the bar in 1824 
or 1825) a man who has made considerably more 
noise in the world than any of these, John Arthur 
Roebuck. 

In May, 1823, my professional occupation and 
status for the next thirty-five years of my life, were 
decided by my father's obtaining for me an appoint- 
ment from the East India Company, in the office of 
the Examiner of India Correspondence, immediately 
under himself. I was appointed in the usual manner, 
at the bottom of the list of clerks, to rise, at least 
in the first instance, by seniority ; but with the 

G 



82 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

understanding that I should be employed from the 

beginning in preparing drafts of despatches, and be 

thus trained up as a successor to those who then 

filled the higher departments of the office. My 

drafts of course required, for some time, much 

revision from my immediate superiors, but I soon 

became well acquainted with the I 

fathers instructions and the _ I growth of i 

own powers, I was in a il-v. 

practically was, the chief conductor of t 1 

deuce with India in one of the leading de] 

that of the Native ued to be i 

official duty until I was appointed Examiner, oi 

two years before the time wi. 

East India Company as a political I ed 

my retirement I do not know any one of the oc 

t ions by which a subsistence cannow 

suitable than such as this to any one who, no \ in 

independent circume -. desires to 

the twenty-four hours to private intellectual pu 

Writing for the piv>s, cannot be recommei 

permanent resource to any one qualifii 

anything in the higher departments of literature r 

thought : not only on account of the ui ,ty 

of this means of livelihood, especially it' the wril 

has a conscience, and will not 

opinions except his own: hut als the 

writings by which one can live. 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 83 

which themselves live, and are never those in which 
the writer does his best. Books destined to form 
future thinkers take too much time to write, 
and when written come, in general, too slowly into 
notice and repute, to be relied on for subsistence. 
Those who have to support themselves by their pen 
must depend on literary drudgery, or at best on 
writings addressed to the multitude ; and can employ 
in the pursuits of their own choice, only such time as 
they can spare from those of necessity ; which is 
generally less than the leisure allowed by office occu- 
pations, while the effect on the mind is far more 
enervating and fatiguing. For my own part I have, 
through life, found office duties an actual rest from the 
other mental occupations which I have carried on 
simultaneously with them. They were sufficiently 
intellectual not to be a distasteful drudgery, without 
being such as to cause any strain upon the mental 
powers of a person used to abstract thought, or to 
the labour of careful literary composition. The draw- 
backs, for every mode of life has its drawbacks, 
were not, however, unfelt by me. I cared little for the 
loss of the chances of riches and honours held out by 
some of the professions, particularly the bar, which 
had been, as I have already said, the profession 
thought of for me. But I was not indifferent to ex- 
clusion from Parliament, and public life : and I felt 
very sensibly the more immediate unpleasantness of 

G 2 



84 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, 

confinement to London; the holiday allowed by 
India-House practice not i a month in the 

year, while my taste v rog for a 

and my sojourn in Prance had left behind it 
ardent desire oftrav* lling. But * 
could not be freely indulged, they v. I no tii 

entirely sacrificed I passed D _h- 

out the year, in the country, taking long rural wa] 
on that day even when i in L 

months holiday was, fur a \\-\, :>><d , 

father's house in the country: attn-wards a or 

the whole wn in tours, i ith 

some one or more of the 3 
chosen companions ; and, at a law r period, in 
journeys or excursi tie or with other fri 

Prance, Belgium, and Elhenish I were within 

easy reach of the animal holiday: and two 
absences, one of three, the of six 

under medical advice, added Swit: 
and Italy to my list Fortunately, also, both th< 
journeys occurred rather early, so 
benefit and charm of the remembn bo a hi 
portion of lite. 

T am disposed to agree with what 1 sur- 

mised by others, that the opporti 
official position gave me of learning 1»\ 
observation the neoessary conditi 
conduct of public affairs, has been of 



AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION. 85 

value to me as a theoretical reformer of the opinions 
and institutions of my time. Not, indeed, that public 
business transacted on paper, to take effect on the 
other side of the globe, was of itself calculated to give 
much practical knowledge of life. But the occupation 
accustomed me to see and hear the difficulties of every 
course, and the means of obviating them, stated and 
discussed deliberately with a view to execution ; it 
gave me opportunities of perceiving when public 
measures, and other political facts, did not produce 
the effects which had been expected of them, and 
from what causes ; above all, it was valuable to me by 
making me, in this portion of my activity, merely one 
wheel in a machine, the whole of which had to work 
together. As a speculative writer, I should have had 
no one to consult but myself, and should have en- 
countered in my speculations none of the obstacles 
which would have started up whenever they came to 
be applied to practice. But as a Secretary con- 
ducting political correspondence, I could not issue an 
order or express an opinion, without satisfying various 
persons very unlike myself, that the thing was fit to 
be done. I was thus in a good position for finding 
out by practice the mode of putting a thought which 
gives it easiest admittance into minds not prepared 
for it by habit ; while I became practically conversant 
with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the 
necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the 



86 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, ETC. 

non-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt h 

obtain the best I could, when I could d 
everything ; i 
because I could n 
to be pleased and • 
smallest pari of n ; and w. 
to bear wit h c [uanimi 

altogether. I have found, 
quisitions to l.r <>! 1 li<- 
for persona] happic od they ai 

necessary condition for 
theorist or as | 
amount of go . 



CHAPTER IV. 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISTS. THE WESTMINSTER 

REVIEW. 

T^HE occupation of so much of my time by office 
work did not relax my attention to my own 
pursuits, which were never carried on more vigorously. 
It was about this time that I began to write in 
newspapers. The first writings of mine which got 
into print were two letters published towards the 
end of 1822, in the Traveller evening newspaper. 
The Traveller (which afterwards grew into the " Globe 
and Traveller/ ' by the purchase and incorporation of 
the Globe) was then the property of the well-known 
political economist, Colonel Torrens, and under the 
editorship of an able man, Mr. Walter Coulson (who, 
after being an amanuensis of Mr. Bentham, became 
a reporter, then an editor, next a barrister and con- 
veyancer, and died Counsel to the Home Office), it 
had become one of the most important newspaper 
organs of Liberal politics. Colonel Torrens himself 
wrote much of the political economy of his paper ; 
and had at this time made an attack upon some 
opinion of Eicardo and my father, to which, at my 



88 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISE 

fathers instigation, I attempted an answer, and 

Coulson, out of consideration for my father and 

goodwill to me, inserted it. There \ re pty by 

Torrens, to which I again n I soon 

attempted something rably more ambi 

The prosecutions of Richard Carlfle and hia wife and 

sister for publications hoc Chrifi 

then exciting much attention, and nowh( >re 

than among the people I frequented Freedom of 

discussion even in poll 

was at that time far from d in theory, bl 

conceded point which it al o be no 

and the holders of obnoxious opini 

always ready to argue the liberty of 

expressing them. I * i of five 1 

under (lie signature oi Wickliff 

whole length and breadth <>t" t : 

publication of all opinions en religionj and 

them to the Morning Chronicle. Three of them v • 

published in January and February, 

two, containing thin. 

never appeared at all Bui a paper which I 

BOOH after on the same sul 

in the House of Commons, was inserted as a 1 

article; and during the whole of i 

a considerable number of i 

printed in the Chronicle and Traveller 

notices of hooks but oftener lot: g on 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 89 

some nonsense talked in Parliament, or some defect 
of the law, or misdoings of the magistracy or the 
courts of justice. In this last department the 
Chronicle was now rendering signal service. After 
the death of Mr. Perry, the editorship and manage- 
ment of the paper had devolved on Mr. John Black, 
long a reporter on its establishment ; a man of most 
extensive reading and information, great honesty and 
simplicity of mind ; a particular friend of my father, 
imbued with many of his and Bentham's ideas, which 
he reproduced in his articles, among other valuable 
thoughts, with great facility and skill. From this 
time the Chronicle ceased to be the merely Whig 
organ it was before, and during the next ten years 
became to a considerable extent a vehicle of the 
opinions of the Utilitarian Ptadicals. This was 
mainly by what Black himself wrote, with some 
assistance from Fonblanque, who first showed his 
eminent qualities as a writer by articles and jeux 
d* esprit in the Chronicle. The defects of the law, and 
of the administration of justice, were the subject on 
which that paper rendered most service to improve- 
ment. Up to that time hardly a word had been said, 
except by Bentham and my father, against that most 
peccant part of English institutions and of their ad- 
ministration. It was the almost universal creed of 
Englishmen, that the law of England, the judica- 
ture of England, the unpaid magistracy of England, 



90 YOUTHFUL PBOPAGANDBM. 

were models of excellence. I do not go beyond the 

mark in saying, that after Bentham, who bi 

the principal materials, the gn share of t 

merit of breaking down this wretched bion 

belongs to Black, as editor of the Morni _ I 

He kept up an incessaj 

absurdities and vices of the law and tl 

justice, paid and unpaid, until he 1 some sei 

of them into people's minds, On man] 

tions he became the of < ► j » 1 1 1 1 < ich in 

advance of any which had ewr before 

regular advocacy in I 

was a fn quenl \ isitor d Mr. I 

used t<> saj t hat he alwaA s km 
morning's arl tele, whether 1 >L 
fa1 ber on the Sunday, Black 
influential of the many channels t! 
my father's conversation and j 1 influei 

his opinions tell on the w arid : co-op g with the 

effect of bis writings in making him a power in I 
country, suchas it bas rarely been the loi erf an indi- 
vidual in a private station to be, through the m< 
force oi intellect and character: and a power which 
was often acting the most efficiently where it v. - 

least Been and suspected. I have ahvad;. 

how much of what was done by Ricardo, 1 1 1 1 t i 
Grote, was the result, in part, of his prompti 
and persuasion. He was bhi y the 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 91 

side of Brougham in most of what he did for the 
public, either on education, law reform, or any other 
subject. And his influence flowed in minor streams 
too numerous to be specified. This influence was 
now about to receive a great extension by the 
foundation of the Westminster Review. 

Contrary to what may have been supposed, my 
father was in no degree a party to setting up the 
Westminster Review. The need of a Radical organ 
to make head against the Edinburgh and Quarterly 
(then in the period of their greatest reputation and 
influence), had been a topic of conversation between 
him and Mr. Bentham many years earlier, and it had 
been a part of their Chateau en Espagne that my 
father should be the editor ; but the idea had never 
assumed any practical shape. In 1823, however, 
Mr. Bentham determined to establish the Review 
at his own cost, and offered the editorship to my 
father, who declined it as incompatible with his India 
House appointment. It was then entrusted to Mr. 
(now Sir John) Bowring, at that time a merchant in 
the City. Mr. Bowring had been for two or three 
years previous an assiduous frequenter of Mr. 
Bentham, to whom he was recommended by many 
personal good qualities, by an ardent admiration for 
Bentham, a zealous adoption of many, though not 
all of his opinions, and, not least, by an extensive 
acquaintanceship and correspondence with Liberals 



92 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

of all countries, which bm to qualify him for 

being a powerful agent in 

fame and d< .'ill < 

world My father 

knew enough of him to 

opinio] 

type from what my i 

conducting a poll 

he augured bo ill of tl 

it altogether, feeling Mr. 

Bentham would 

would probal 

Ee oould Mr. I 

}\r 001 I tO ' 

QUmtx i\ Afl 

Bcheme form 

should be 

tins article "1" my fath 

cism ofthe Edinburgh I; 

Before writ ing it he m h all * 

volumes of t : 

of any importance (which \ 

in I B23 as it would I 

him of the hich I 

bo examine, ( 

bad qualities 

chief cause of the - 

Review produced a, 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 93 

in conception and in execution, one of the most 
striking of all his writings. He began by an 
analysis of the tendencies of periodical literature 
in general ; pointing out, that it cannot, like books, 
wait for success, but must succeed immediately, or 
not at all, and is hence almost certain to profess and 
inculcate the opinions already held by the public 
to which it addresses itself, instead of attempting 
to rectify or improve those opinions. He next, to 
characterize the position of the Edinburgh Review as 
a political organ, entered into a complete analysis, 
from the Radical point of view, of the British Con- 
stitution, lie held up to notice its thoroughly 
aristocratic character : the nomination of a majority 
of the House of Commons by a few hundred families; 
the entire identification of the more independent 
portion, the county members, with the great land- 
holders ; the different classes whom this narrow 
oligarchy was induced, for convenience, to admit to 
a share of power ; and finally, what he called its 
two props, the Church, and the legal profession. 
He pointed out the natural tendency of an aris- 
tocratic body of this composition, to group itself into 
two parties, one of them in possession of the execu- 
tive, the other endeavouring to supplant the former 
and become the predominant section by the aid of 
public opinion, without any essential sacrifice of the 
aristocratical predominance. He described the course 



94 THK WESTMIN81 EB W. 

likely to ho pursued, and I I oc u- 

pied, by an aristocratic party In 

with popular principL i of popular 

support. 1 [e ed how this i< sed in 

the conduct of the Whig 

Review - chief . I !«■ 

their mail] chara 

writing all ly on 

which touched the | 

rl;i tmetimes in di in 

dilU'ivni 

Lis position by 
an attack oi Whig j 

M mad 
ruck, in this country, I 
I believe, ai y i : 
article, except r.* 

In the meantime t hi 
junction * ith another pr f a pu 

periodical, to be edited by Mr. I 
afterwards a diplomatic 
3sioa The I 
\ divide the editorship, 

8 



second nnml 

. in whicl J 

I 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 95 

Review was to have been published by Longman, and 
that firm, though part proprietors of the Edinburgh, 
re willing to be the publishers of the new journal. 
But when all the an uents had been made, and 

the pi OS] s sent out, the Longmans saw my 

fathers attack on the Edinburgh, and drew back. 
My father was now appealed to for his interest with 
his own publisher, Baldwin, which was exerted with a 
successful result. And so, in April, 1824, amidst 
anything but hope on my lather's part, and that of 
most of those who afterwards aided in carrying on 
the Review, the first number made its appearance. 
That number was an agreeable surprise to most of us. 
The average of the articles was of much better quality 
than had been expected The literary and artistic 
department had rested chiefly on Mr. Bingham, a 
barrister (subsequently a police magistrate), who had 
been for some years a frequenter of Bentham, was a 
friend of both the Austins, and had adopted with 
great ardour Mr. Bentham's philosophical opinions. 
Partly from accident, there were hi the first number 
as many as five articles by Bingham ; and we were 
extremely pleased with them. I well remember the 
mixed feeling I myself had about the Review ; the 
joy at finding, what we did not at all expect, that it was 
sufficiently good to be capable of being made a 
creditable organ of those who held the opinions it 
professed ; and extreme vexation, since it was so good 



96 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

on the whole, at what we thought the blemishes of it. 
When, however, in addition to our generally favour- 
able opinion of it, we learned that it had an extra- 
ordinary large Bale for a first number, and found that 
t he appearance of a Radical Etevi 
equal to those of the established i 
had excited much attention, there could be no 
for hesitation, and we all became eager b 
thing we could I and improve it. 

My father continued to write <• 
The Quarterly Review n 

to that of the Edinburgh I [bu- 

ttons, the mos( important v. 

Book of tlie Church, in the fifth numb I a 

political article in the twelfth- Mr. 
tributed one paper, but one i 
argument against primogeniture, in replj 
then lately published in the Edinburgh 1 by 

M'Culloch. Grote also was 

all the time he could spare up 

with his History of Greeoa The arti 

was on his own subject, and was a \ 

posure and castigation of Mitford 1 

Charles Austin continued to wri 

Fonblanque was a foequi atribui m the 

third number. Of my particular i 

a regular writer up to the ninth nunitx i 

the time when ho Left off, otl ' the sot beg; 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 97 

Ejton Tooke, Graham, and Roebuck. I was myself 
the most frequent writer of all, having contributed, 
from the second number to the eighteenth, thirteen 
articles ; reviews of books on history and political 
economy, or discussions on special political topics, as 
corn laws, game laws, law of libel. Occasional 
articles of merit came in from other acquaintances of 
my father's, and, in time, of mine ; and some of 
Mr. Bowling's writers turned out welL On the 
whole, however, the conduct of the Review was never 
satisfactory to any of the persons strongly in- 
terested in its principles, with whom I came in 
contact. Hardly ever did a number come out with- 
out containing several tilings extremely offensive 
to us, either in point of opinion, of taste, or by mere 
want of ability. The unfavourable judgments passed 
by my father, Grote, the two Austins, and others, 
were re-echoed with exaggeration by us younger 
people ; and as our youthful zeal rendered us by no 
means backward in making complaints, we led the two 
editors a sad life. From my knowledge of what I then 
was, I have no doubt that we were at least as often wrong 
as right; and I am very certain that if the Review 
had been carried on according to our notions (I mean 
those of the juniors), it would have been no better, 
perhaps not even so good as it was. But it is worth 
noting as a fact in the history of Benthamism, that 
the periodical organ, by which it was best known, was 

H 



98 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

from the first extremely ui ctoryto those wfc 

[nions on all subjects it wa to 

resent. 

Meanwhile, however, the R 
1( i i • in the world, 

in the arena of opinion and d 

thamic type of Badi I of all pro] 

number of its adherents, and to tin 

I abiliti * hat time, of most of I could 

be reckoned among them. I v .n, 

of rapidly rising Liberalism. Wh* 

animositi r with France I 

been brought to an I 

place in their I t >r ham 

began to sei towards n E arm. X 

sion of the Continent by the i 

countenance apparei 

ment to the oonspiran ailed the 

Holy Alliance, and the enonn t of t 

national debt and 

and costly a war, rendered I 

ment very unpopular. Radic Rsi 

ship of the Burdetts and I 1 i 

character and importance w 
Administration: and their alarm 

temporarily i by th< 

when the trial of Qu 

•ad^. deeper feeling of hatred T .rd 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 99 

signs of this hatred passed away with its exciting 
cause, there arose on all sides a spirit which had 
never shown itself before, of opposition to abuses in 
detail. Mr. Humes persevering scrutiny of the public 
expenditure, forcing the House of Commons to a 
division on every objectionable item in the estimates, 
had begun to tell with great force on public opinion, 
and had extorted many minor retrenchments from 
an unwilling admin! si. Political economy had 

asserted it» If with great vigour in public affairs, by 
the petition of the merchants of London for free 
trade, drawn up iii L820 by Mr, Tooke and presented 
by Mr. Alexander Baring ; and by the noble exertions 
of Ricardo during the 1' \m of his parliamentary 

life. His writings, following up the impulse given by 
the Bullion controversy, and followed up in their turn 
by the expositions and comments of my father and 
M'Culloch (whose writings in the Edinburgh Review 
during those were most valuable), had drawn 

general attention to the subject, making at least 
partial converts in the Cabinet itself ; and Huskisson, 
supported by Canning, had commenced that gradual 
demolition of the protective system, which one of their 
colleagues virtually completed in 1846, though the 
last vestiges were only swept away by Mr. Gladstone 
in 1860. Mr. Peel, then Home Secretary, was enter- 
ing cautiously into the untrodden and peculiarly 
Benthamic path of Law Reform. At this period, when 

H 2 



100 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

Liberalism seemed to be becoming the tone of the 
time, when improvement of institute i d 

from the highest places, and a complete change of the 
constitution of Parliament was loudly demanded in 
the lowest, it is not strange that attention should hi 
been roused by the regular appearance in contr 
of what seemed a new school of wril y to 

be the legislators and tl. bs of tl 

dency. The air of strong conviction with which tl 
wrote, when scarcely any our else seemed to h 
an equally strong faith in as definite u d ; the 

boldness with which they tilted against the very 
front of both the existing political parti >ir un- 

compromising profession of opposition to many of 1 
generally received opinions, and the suspicion t 1 
lay under of holding otl ill more I 

than they professed ; the talent and verve of a1 

my father's articles, and the app fa coi 

behind him sufficient to cany on a Review ; and 
finally, the fact that the Review v. ml 

read, made the so-called Bentham school in phi] 
sophy and politics iill a greater place in the public 
mind than it had held before, or hafi 
held since other equally earn 
have arisen in England, As I was in the h< 
quarters oi* it, knew of what it was composed, and 
as one of the most active of its ven I numl 

might say without undue assumption, quorum pan 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 101 

magna fui, it belongs to me more than to most others, 
to give some account of it. 

This supposed school, then, had no other existence 
than what was constituted by the fact, that my 
father's writings and conversation drew round him 
a certain number of young men who had already 
imbibed, or who imbibed from him, a greater or 
smaller portion of his very decided political and 
philosophical opinions. The notion that Bentham 
was surrounded by a band of disciples who received 
their opinions from his lips, is a fable to which my 
father did justice in his " Fragment on Mackintosh," 
and which, to all who knew Mr. Bentham' s habits of 
life and manner of conversation, is simply ridicu- 
lous. The influence which Bentham exercised was 
by his writings. Through them he has produced, 
and is producing, effects on the condition of man- 
kind, wider and deeper, no doubt, than any which 
can be attributed to my father. He is a much 
greater name in history. But my father exercised 
a far greater personal ascendancy. He was sought 
for the vigour and instructiveness of his conversa- 
tion, and did use it largely as an instrument for the 
diffusion of his opinions. I have never known any 
man who could do such ample justice to his best 
thoughts in colloquial discussion. His perfect com- 
mand over his great mental resources, the terseness 
and expressiveness of his language and the moral 



102 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

earnestness as well as intellectual force of his 
delivery, made him one of the most striking of all arg 
mentative conversers : and he was full of am 
a hearty laugher, and, when with people whom he 
liked, a most lively and amusing companion. It 
was not solely, or even chiefly, in diffusing his 
merely intellectual convictions that his power 
showed itself: it was still more through the influence 
of a quality, of which I have only since learnt to 
appreciate tlie extreme rarity: thai >1 public 

spirit, and regard above all tlii' 

the whole, which warmed into lit"' and activity 
germ of similar virtue thai '1 in the mil 

he came in contact with: tin e he made them 

feel for his approbation, the sh ip- 

prova] ; the moral support which his com n and 

his very existence gave t<> those who were aimi 
the same objects, and the encouragement h< 
to the fainthearted or desponding among them, by 
the firm confidence which (though the reverse of 
sanguine as to the results to he expected in any- 
one particular case) he always felt in the power of 
reason, the general progress of improvement, 
the good which individuals could do by judici< 
effort. 

It was my fathers opinions which gave 
distinguishing character to the luaithanii 
utilitarian propagandist*] of that time. They tell 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 103 

singly, scattered from him, in many directions, but 
they flowed from him in a continued stream 
principally in three channels. One was through 
me, the only mind directly formed by his instruc- 
tions, and through whom considerable influence was 
exercised over various young men, who became, 
in their turn, propagandists. A second was through 
some of the Cambridge contemporaries of Charles 
Austin, who, either initiated by him or under the 
general mental impulse which he gave, had adopted 
many opinions allied to those of my father, and some 
of the more considerable of whom afterwards sought 
my father s acquaintance and frequented his house. 
Among these may be mentioned Strutt, afterwards 
Lord Belper, and the present Lord Romilly, with 
whose eminent father, Sir Samuel, my father had of 
old been on terms of friendship. The third channel 
was that of a younger generation of Cambridge 
undergraduates, contemporary, not with Austin, but 
with Eyton Tooke, who were drawn to that estimable 
person by affinity of opinions, and introduced by 
him to my father : the most notable of these was 
Charles Buller. Various other persons individually 
received and transmitted a considerable amount of 
my fathers influence : for example, Black (as before 
mentioned) and Fonblanque : most of these, how- 
ever, we accounted only partial allies ; Fonblanque, 
for instance, was always divergent from us on many 



104 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

important points. But indeed there was by no means 
complete unanimity among any portion of us, nor 
had any of us adopted implicitly all my fathers 
opinions. For example, although his Essay qq 
Government was regarded probably by all of us as a 
masterpiece of political wisdom, oui sion by no 

means extended to the paragraph of it, in which lie 
maintains that women m >ntly with good 

government, be excluded from the suffrage, 1) 
their interest is the Baine with that of m< 
From this doctrine, I, and all those who formed * 
chosen associates, most positively di 1. It is 

due to my father to say that he denied I 
intended to affirm that women 6 
any more than men under the age of i' >n- 

cerning whom he maintained, in th< next 

paragraph, an exactly similar thesis. 11 w 
he truly said, not discussing whether 
had better be restricted, but only (assuming 
it is to be restricted) what is the utmost limit 
of restriction, which docs not n< ily involve a 

sacrifice of the securities i I government l>ut 

I thought then, as I have always thought sine 
the opinion which he acknowledged, I 
that which he disclaimed, is as great an er 
of those against which the Essay w 
the interest of women is included in 
exactly as much and no more, as the intei 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 105 

subjects is included in that of kings ; and that every 
reason which exists for giving the suffrage to any- 
body, demands that it should not be withheld from 
women. This was also the general opinion of the 
younger proselytes ; and it is pleasant to be able to 
say that Mr. Bentham, on this important point, was 
wholly on our side. 

But though none of us, probably, agreed in every 
respect with my father, his opinions, as I said before, 
were the principal element which gave its colour and 
character to the little group of young men who were 
the first propagators of what was afterwards called 
"Philosophic Radicalism." Their mode of thinking 
was not characterized by Benthamism in any sense 
which has relation to Bentham as a chief or guide, 
but rather by a combination of Bentham's point 
of view with that of the modern political eco- 
nomy, and with the Hartleian metaphysics. Mal- 
thus's population principle was quite as much a 
banner, and point of union among us, as any opinion 
specially belonging to Bentham. This great doc- 
trine, originally brought forward as an argument 
against the indefinite unprovability of human affairs, 
we took up with ardent zeal in the contrary sense, 
as indicating the sole means of realizing that un- 
provability by securing full employment at high wages 
to the whole labouring population through a volun- 
tary restriction of the increase of their numbers. The 



106 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

other leading chafad creed, wh] 

in common with my . may 1"* b : 

In politics, an almost unbounded con 
efficacy of two things r, nt, 

and complete freedom of di a So 

my fat her's reliance on I he in£ 

t he minds of mankind, \ 

i hem, that he fell as if all would 

whole populal ion were if all - 

opinions were allowed to be add 

word and iii \n riting, and if bj 

t hoy could nominate a 1 

opinions I hej adopted He I hou w hen the 

legislal ure no long r r* 

would aim at the general i d « ith 

adequate \\ isdom ; sin 

cicni ly under the guide 

to make in general I 

sent them, and having done so, 

whom they had i a liberal - a A • rd- 

ingly aristocratic rule, the government of th< 

in any of its shapes, being in >nly thi 

which stood between mankind q admii 

of their affairs ly the b 

them, was the object of his sternest die 

iiud a democratic 

political creed, not on the ground of li 

Man, or any oi' the phrases, D I 3S - \ 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 107 

by which, up to that time, democracy had usually 
been defended, but as the most essential of " se- 
curities for good government. " In this, too, he held 
fist only to what he deemed essentials ; he was 
comparatively indifferent to monarchical or republican 
forms — far more so than Bentham, to whom a king, 
in the character of " corrupter-general," appeared 
necessarily very noxious. Next to aristocracy, an 
established church, or corporation of priests, as being 
by position the great depravers of religion, and 
interested in opposing the progress of the human 
mind, was the object of his greatest detestation; 
though lie disliked no clergyman personally who did 
not deserve it. and was on terms of sincere friendship 
witl raL In ethics, his moral feelings were 

ene and rigid on all points which he deemed 

important to human weU being, while he was 
supremely indifferent in opinion (though his indiffe- 
rence did not show itself in personal conduct) to all 
those doctrines of the common morality, which he 
thought had n« i C ^nidation but in asceticism and priest- 
craft. He looked forward, for example, to a consider- 
able increase of freedom in the relations between the 
sexes, though without pretending to define exactly 
what would be, or ought to be, the precise conditions 
of that freedom. This opinion was connected in him 
with no sensuality either of a theoretical or of a 
practical kind. He anticipated, on the contrary, as 



108 THE WESTltlX&TEB REVIEW, 

one of the beneficial effects of ina m, 

that the imagination would no loi well upon the 

ph)^sical relation and its adjuncts, and swell I 

into one of the principal i 

of the imagination and feelings, which he re 

one of the deepec d and most ] vilsin 

the human mind. In psychology, bis fundament 

doctrine was the formation of all human character by 

circumstances, through t lie universal Principle of 

Association, and the consequent unlimited possibili 

of improving the moral and intellectual condil 

mankind by education Of all bis d< 

Mas more important than this, or needs more to be 

insisted on : unfortunately tin which i 

Contradictory to the pivvailiii. ila- 

tion, both in his time and ain 

These various opinions wen i on with youth- 

ful fanaticism by the little knot of young i of 
whom I was one ; and we put into them a 

spirit, from which, in inu ation at Least, inv 

wholly free. What we (or rather a phantom 

tuted in the place of us) 

exaggeration, called by others, oao 

some of us for a time really boped and 

be. The French nth 

century were the example we - iniitaJ 

we hoped to accomplish no less results. N 

the set went to so great e\ - in this ai- 



THE WESTMINSTER KEVIEW. 109 

bition as I did ; which might be shown by many parti- 
culars, were it not an useless waste of space and time. 

All this, however, is properly only the outside of 
our existence ; or, at least, the intellectual part 
alone, and no more than one side of that. In 
attempting to penetrate inward, and give any indi- 
cation of what we were as human beings, I must be 
understood as speaking only of myself, of whom alone 
I can speak from sufficient knowledge ; and I do not 
believe that the picture would suit any of my com- 
panions without many and great modifications. 

I conceive that the description so often given of a 
Benthamite, as a mere reasoning machine, though ex- 
tremely inapplicable to most of those who have been 
designated by that title, was during two or three years 
of my life not altogether untrue of me. It was 
perhaps as applicable to me as it can well be to any one 
just entering into life, to whom the common objects of 
desire must in general have at least the attraction of 
novelty. There is nothing very extraordinary in this 
fact : no youth of the age I then was, can be expected 
to be more than one thing, and this was the thing I 
happened to be. Ambition and desire of distinction, 
I had in abundance ; and zeal for what I thought the 
good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing 
with and colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet 
little else, at that period of my life, than zeal for 
speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine 



I 1 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

benevolence, or sympathy with mankind; f 
those qualities held their due place in my 

andard Nor was ii bed with any hi 

enthusiasm for ideal aoblenesa Yet o£\ 3 1 

was imaginai n 1 ly very - 
nt that t ime an in; 

poetical culture, while th< b a superabuj 

of the discipline antagonistic to r 
and analysia Add to this thai , as already 1 
my tin bar <-d to the undervalui 

feeling. It 1 I thai he was bio 

or insensible ; I believe it v. from the o 

quality ; be thought t 
itself ; thai thai 1 
were properly oared 
with which, in el tnd phi] eophi 

feeling is made the ultimate reaaon and 
of conduct, instead of U led on for a 

justification, while, in prac 
which on human happin 
as being required by feeling, and tin 
person of I 
thought only due 
of attributing pr 

sparing reference to it, c in tl 

persona or in the di a of tl 

to the influence which I • in bin 

on me and other.-, \\ 1 all the opini which 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. Ill 

we attached most importance, constantly attacked on 
the ground of feeling. Utility was denounced as 
cold calculation ; political economy as hard-hearted ; 
anti-population doctrines as repulsive to the natural 
feelings of mankind. We retorted by the word 
"sentimentality," which, along with " declamation" 
and " vague generalities/' served us as common terms 
of opprobrium. Although we were generally in the 
right, as against those who were opposed to us, the 
effect was that the cultivation of feeling (except the 
feelings of public and private duty), was not in much 
eem among us, and had very little place in the 
thoughts of most of us, myself in particular. What 
we principally thought of, was to alter people's 
opinions ; to make them believe according to evidence, 
and know whai was their real interest, which when 
they once knew, they would, we thought, by the 
instrument of opinion, enforce a regard to it upon one 
another. While fully recognising the superior ex- 
cellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, 
we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from 
any direct action on those sentiments, but from the 
effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish 
feelings. Although this last is prodigiously im- 
portant as a means of improvement in the hands of 
those who are themselves impelled by nobler principles 
of action, I do not believe that any one of the sur- 
vivors of the Benthamites or Utilitarians of that day, 



112 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

now relies mainly upon it for the general amendment 
of human conduct. 

From this neglect both in theory and in pn 
the cultivation of feeling, naturally resulted, am< 
other things, an undervaluing of po< and of 

Imagination generally, as an element of hum 
nature. It is, or\v;i<. part of the popular notion of Ben- 
thamites, that they are enemies of poetry : thi 
partly true of Bentham himself; he used to Bay that 
" all poetry is misrepresents ion :" but in the sense in 
which he said it, the Bame might have been said of 
all impressive speech ; of all representation or incul- 
cation more oratorical in its character than a sum in 
arithmetic. An article of Bingham's in th< 
number of the Westminster Review, in which he 
offered as an explanation of something which 1 
liked in Moore, that M Bir. Moore is a md the] 

lore is not a reaSOner did a crood deal t« 

notion of hating poetry to the writer- in the Review, 
Bui the truth was that many of us w< 2 t read< 
of poetry ; Bingham himself had been a writer of it, 
while as regards me (and the might 

said of my father), the correct statement would I 
not that I disliked poetry, but thai 1 lly 

indifferent io it. 1 disliked any sentiments in | 
which 1 should have disliked in pro* in- 

cluded a great deal. And 1 was wholly blind 
place in human culture, as a meai duoating the 



YOUTHFUL PKOPAGANDISM. 113 

feelings. But I was always personally very susceptible 
to some kinds of it. In the most sectarian period 
of my Benthamism, I happened to look into Pope's 
Essay on Man, and though every opinion in it was 
contrary to mine, I well remember how powerfully it 
acted on my imagination. Perhaps at that time 
poetical composition of any higher type than eloquent 
discussion in verse, might not have produced a similar 
effect me : at all events I seldom gave it an oppor- 
tunity. This, however, was a mere passive state. 
Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree, 
the basis of my intellectual creed, I had obtained in 
the natural course of my mental progress, poetic 
culture of the most valuable kind, by means of 
reverential admiration for the lives and characters of 
heroic persons ; especially the heroes of philosophy. 
The same inspiring effect which so many of the bene- 
factors of mankind have left on record that they had 
experienced from Plutarch's Lives, was produced on 
me by Plato's pictures of Socrates, and by some 
modern biographies, above all by Condorcet's Life of 
Turgot ; a book well calculated to rouse the best sort 
of enthusiasm, since it contains one of the wisest and 
noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and 
noblest of men. The heroic virtue of these glorious 
representatives of the opinions with which I sympa- 
thized, deeply affected me, and I perpetually recurred 
to them as others do to a favourite poet, when need- 

I 



114 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISE. 

ing to be carried up into the more elevated regions 
of feeling and thought. I may observe by the 
that this book cured me of my ian folliea J 

two or three pages beginning "II regardait toe 
secte comme nuisible,* and explaining why Target 
always kept himself perfectly distin* . - 

cyclopedists, sank deeply into my mind I left off 
designating myself and oth Utilitarians, and bj 

the pronoun " we" or any other coiled ive designat ion, 
I ceased to afficher sectarianism. My real inward 

sectarianism 1 did no< gel rid of till later, and much 
mere gradually. 

About the end of 1824, or beginning of 1825, Mr. 
Bentham, having lately got back his Evi- 

dence fromM.Dumont (whose Traits d Pn di- 

ciaires, grounded on them, was t! amplei 

and published) resolved to have them printed in the 
original, and bethought himself of m< of 

preparing them lor the press ; in tl. 
as his Book of Fallacies had been recently edited 
by BinghattL I gladly undertook this I it 

occupied nearly all my leisure for about a 

elusive of the time afterwards spent in seeing the 

five large volumes through the press. Mr. 1 

had begun this treatise three th 

intervals, each time in a different manner. 

time without reference to the preceding : two of the 

three times he had gone over nearly the whole sub- 



YOUTHFUL PHOPAGANDISM. 115 

ject. These three masses of manuscript it was my 
business to condense into a single treatise ; adopting 
the one last written as the groundwork, and incor- 
porating with it as much of the two others as it had 
not completely superseded. I had also to unroll such 
of Bentham's involved and parenthetical sentences, as 
seemed to overpass by their complexity the measure 
of what readers were likely to take the pains to 
understand. It was further Mr. Benthams parti- 
cular desire that I should, from myself, endeavour 
to supply any lacuncc which he had left ; and at his 
instance I read, for this purpose, the most authorita- 
tive treatises on the English Law of Evidence, and 
commented on a few of the objectionable points of 
the English rules, which had escaped Benthams 
notice. I also replied to the objections which had 
been made to some of his doctrines by reviewers of 
Dumo.t's book, and added a few supplementary 
remarks on some of the more abstract parts of the 
subject, such as the theory of improbability and im- 
possibility. The controversial part of these editorial 
additions was written in a more assuming tone than 
became one so young and inexperienced as I was : 
but indeed I had never contemplated coining forward 
in my own person ; and as an anonymous editor of 
Bentham, I fell into the tone of my author, not think- 
ing it unsuitable to him or to the subject, however 
it might be so to me. My name as editor was put 

I 2 



116 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISE 

to the book after it was printed, at Mr. Bentham's 
positive desire, which I in vain attempted to per- 
suade him to forego. 

The time occupied in this rial work was ex- 

tremely well employed In respect to my own improve- 
ment. The "Rationale of Judicial Evidence 91 ifl one 
of the richest in matter of all Bentham'a produ 
The theory ol evidence being in P one of the 

most important of his sal and ramifying b 

most of the others, the book c fully 

developed, a greal proportion of all hi 
while, among more special things, it eomj the 

most elaborate exposure of the \ 
English law, as it tl ud in 

his works; not confined to the law ut 

Including, by way of illusl 
procedure or practice of Westminster Hall. 
direct knowledge, therefore, which 1 I from 

the book, and which was imprinted upon me much 
more thoroughly than it could have hern 1»\ 
reading, was itself no small ation, 

occupation did lor me what 
expected ; it gave a great start to my | 
composition. Everything which 1 wp 
to this editorial employment, 
to anything that 1 had written before it. B 

later Style, as the world knows, w VJ and 

bersome, from the excess of a good quality. 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISING 117 

of precision, which made him introduce clause within 
clause into the heart of every sentence, that the 
reader might receive into his mind all the modifica- 
tions and qualifications simultaneously with the main 
proposition : and the habit grew on him until his 
sentences became, to those not accustomed to them, 
most laborious reading. But his earlier style, that 
of the Fragment on Government, Plan of a Judicial 
Establishment, &c, is a model of liveliness and 
ease combined with fulness of matter, scarcely ever 
surpassed : and of this earlier style there were many 
striking specimens in the manuscripts on Evidence, 
all of which I endeavoured to preserve. So long a 
course of this admirable writing had a considerable 
effect upon my own ; and I added to it by the 
assiduous reading of other writers, both French and 
English, who combined, in a remarkable degree, ease 
with force, such as Goldsmith, Fielding, Pascal, Vol- 
taire, and Courier. Through these influences my 
writing lost the jejuneness of my early compositions ; 
the bones and cartilages began to clothe themselves 
with flesh, and the style became, at times, lively and 
almost light. 

This improvement was first exhibited in a new 
field. Mr. Marshall, of Leeds, father of the present 
generation of Marshalls, the same who was brought 
into Parliament for Yorkshire, when the representa- 
tion forfeited by Grampound was transferred to it, 



118 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDIST. 

an earnest Parliamentary reformer, and a man of 

large fortune, of which lie made a libera] use, had 

been much struck with Bentham's Book of Falls - : 

and the thought had occurred to him that it would 

ho useful to publish annually the Parli ary 

Debates, not in the chronological order of Hansard, 

but classified according to fl ted 

by a commentary pointing out the fall 

speakers. With this intention, he very naturally 

addressed himself to the editor of I of 

Fallacies; and Bingham, with the 

Charles Austin, undertook the i bipi T 

work was called " Parliai 

Review." Its sale was not a t to keep it in 

existence, and it only lasted thn 
however, some attention aim 

political people, The bee ogth < party 

was put forth in it; and itfl ition did them mi 

more credit than that of the Westminster Review 
had ever done. Bingham and Charles Austin wr 
much in it ; as did Strutt, Romilly, and several otl 
Liberal lawyera Mv father v. 
host style: the elder Austin 
wrote one oi l great merit. It tell to my 1,.; to 1 
oil the first number by an article on the pri 
topic of the I of I lie 

Association and the Catholic Disabilities, In the 
second number I wrote an elaborate E n the 

Commercial Crisis of' 1825 and theCurrencv IV 



YOUTHFUL propagandise:. 119 

In the third I had two articles, one on a minor 
subject, the other on the Reciprocity principle in 
commerce, apropos of a celebrated diplomatic corre- 
spondence between Canning and Gallatin. These 
writings were no longer mere reproductions and 
applications of the doctrines I had been taught ; they 
were original thinking, as far as that name can be 
applied to old ideas in new forms and connexions : 
and I do not exceed the truth in saying that there 
was a maturity, and a well-digested character about 
them, which there had not been in any of my 
previous performances. In execution, therefore, they 
were not at all juvenile ; but their subjects have either 
gone by, or have been so much better treated since, 
that they are entirely superseded, and should remain 
buried in the same oblivion with my contributions 
to the first dynasty of the Westminster Review. 

While thus engaged in writing for the public, I 
did not neglect other modes of self-cultivation. It 
was at this time that I learnt German; beginning it 
on the Hamiltonian method, for which purpose I and 
several of my companions formed a class. For 
several years from this period, our social studies 
assumed a shape which contributed very much to 
my mental progress. The idea occurred to us of 
carrying on, by reading and conversation, a joint 
study of several of the branches of science which 
we wished to be masters of. We assembled to the 
number of a dozen or more. Mr. Grote lent a room 



120 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISE 

of his house in Threadneedle Street for the purpose, 
and his partner, Prescott, one of the three original 
members of the Utilitarian Society, made one ami 
us. We met two mornings in eveiy week, from 
half-past eight till ten, at which hour must of 
us were called off to our daily occupations. Our 
first subject was Political Economy, We chose some 
systematic treat our text-book ; my lath- 

" Elements" being our first choice. One of Ufl 
aloud a chapter, or some smaller portion of the book. 
The discus-ion was then opened, and any one v 
had an objection, or other remark to make, made it 
( hir rule was to discuss thoroughly ei eiy point raised, 
whether great or small, prolonging the disc 
until all who took part w( ed with the con- 

clusion they had individually arrived at ; and to 
follow up every topic of collateral Bpeculationwhich the 
chapter or the conversation suggested, never lea> ing it 

until we had untied every knot which wefound W 

repeatedly kept up the discussion of some one point 

for several weeks, thinking intently on it during the 

intervals of our meetings, and contrivj 

of the new difficulties which had risen up in the 1 

morning's discussion. When we had finished in tl 

way my father's Elements, we went in the 

manner through Ricardo's Principles of P 

Economy, and Bailey's Dissertation ^n Yah. 

close and vigorous discussions were not :u- 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 121 

proving in a high degree to those who took part in 
them, but brought out new views of some topics 
of abstract Political Economy. The theory of Inter- 
national Values which I afterwards published, 
emanated from these conversations, as did also the 
modified form of Ricardo s theory of Profits, laid 
down in my Essay on Profits and Interest. Those 
among us with whom new speculations chiefly origi- 
nated, were Ellis, Graham, and I ; though others 
gave valuable aid to the discussions, especially 
Prescott and Roebuck, the one by his knowledge, 
the other by his dialectical acuteness. The theories of 
International Values and of Profits were excogitated 
and worked out in about equal proportions by myself 
and Graham : and if our original project had been 
executed, my " Essays on Some Unsettled Questions 
of Political Economy" would have been brought 
out along with some papers of his, under our joint 
names. But when my exposition came to be written, 
I found that I had so much over-estimated my agree- 
ment with him, and he dissented so much from the 
most original of the two Essays, that on Inter- 
national Values, that I was obliged to consider the 
theory as now exclusively mine, and it came out as 
such when published many years later. I may mention 
that among the alterations which my father made in 
revising his Elements for the third edition, several 
were founded on criticisms elicited by these conver- 



122 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISE. 

sations ; and in particular he modified his opinions 

(though not to the extent of our n< 

on both the points to which T have adverted 

When we had enough litica] • we 

took up the syllogistic logic in the same n. 
Grote now joining as. Our first b 
Aldrich, but being disgusted with i 
we reprinted one of the most finished amoi 
many manuals of the school which my * 

a great collector of such books, \ 
ductio ad Logicam of the Jesuil Du Triea 
finishing tins, we t ••«.]< uj) AVlntrly's Logic, tJ 
first republished firom the I dia M< 

Litana, and finally the k- Com] 
J [obbea These books, d( ith in cur d 

afforded a wide range for original metaphysical - 
dilation : and most of what has been done in ' 
First Book of my System of I 
and correct the principles and distil] 
school logicians, and to improve the the* 
Import of Propositions, had its origin in I 
cussions ; ( fraham and I i 
novelties, while ( rrote and 
lent tribunal or test From this tim 1 
project of writing a 1 
much humbler scale than th< 1 ultim 

outed 

1 raving done with Logic, we launched 



YOUTHFUL PHOPAGANDISM. 123 

Psychology, and having chosen Hartley for our text- 
book, we raised Priestley's edition to an extravagant 
price by searching through London to furnish each 
of us with a copy. When we had finished Hartley, 
we suspended our meetings ; but my fathers Ana- 
lysis of the Mind being published soon after, we 
reassembled for the purpose of reading it. With 
this our exercises ended. I have always dated from 
these conversations my own real inauguration as an 
original and independent thinker. It was also 
through them that I acquired, or very much 
strengthened, a mental habit to which I attribute 
all that I have ever done, or ever shall do, in specula- 
tion ; that of never accepting half-solutions of diffi- 
culties as complete ; never abandoning a puzzle, but 
again and again returning to it until it was cleared 
up ; never allowing obscure corners of a subject to 
remain unexplored, because they did not appear im- 
portant ; never thinking that I perfectly understood 
any part of a subject until I understood the whole. 

Our doings from 1825 to 1830 in the way of public 
speaking, tilled a considerable place in my life daring 
those years, and as they had important effects on my 
development, something ought to be said of them. 

There was for some time in existence a society of 
Owenites, called the Co-operation Society, which 
met for weekly public discussions in Chancery Lane. 
In the early part of 1825, accident brought Roebuck 



124 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISE 

in contact with several of its members, and led tc 
his attending one or two of the meet ad taking 

part in the debate in opposition to Owenism. 
one of us started the notion of going there in a 
and having a general battle : and ( lharles Austin . 
some of his friends who did not usually take part in 
our joint exercises, entered into the project. It v 
carried out by concert with the principal members 
of the Society, themsel ves nothing loth, as they 
naturally preferred a controversy with op] -to 

a tame discussion among their own body The qu< 
tion of population was proposed as the subject of 
debate : Charles Austin led the < ith 

a brilliant speech, and the up by 

adjournment through five or she weekly m< 
before crowded auditories, including alone: with the 
members of the Society and their fiien my 

hearers and seme speakers from the Inns of Court 

When this debate was ended, another was com- 
menced on the genera] merits of I ►wen's system : and 
the contest altogether lasted about three d 
It was a luttc carps A corj preen Owenito 

political economists, whom the Owenites 
their most inveterate opponents: but it was a | 
fectly friendly dispute. We who reprei d poli- 
tical economy, had the same objects in view as tl 
had, and took pains to show it ; and the principal 
tfhampion on their side was a verv estimable 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 125 

with whom I was well acquainted, Mr. William 
Thompson, of Cork, author of a book on the Distri- 
bution of Wealth, and of an " Appeal " in behalf of 
women against the passage relating to them in my 
father s Essay on Government. Ellis, Roebuck, and 
I took an active part in the debate, and among those 
from the Inns of Court who joined in it, I remember 
Charles Villiers. The other side obtained also, on 
the population question, very efficient support from 
without. The well-known Gale Jones, then an elderly 
man, made one of his florid speeches ; but the speaker 
with whom I was most struck, though I dissented 
from nearly every word he said, was Thirlwall, the 
historian, since Bishop of St. David's, then a Chan- 
cery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation 
for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union 
before the era of Austin and Macaulay. His speech 
was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered 
ten sentences, I set him down as the best speaker I 
had ever heard, and I have never since heard any one 
whom I placed above him. 

The great interest of these debates predisposed 
some of those who took part in them, to catch at 
a suggestion thrown out by M'Culloch, the political 
economist, that a Society was wanted in London 
similar to the Speculative Society at Edinburgh, in 
which Brougham, Horner, and others first cultivated 
public speaking. Our experience at the Co-opera- 



126 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISE 

tive Society seemed to give cause for being sanguine 
as to the sort of men who micrht be brought 
in London for such a purpose. M'Culloch d 
the matter to several young men of influence, to wh< m 
lv was then giving private 1 in political 

Some of these entered warmly into the j 
particularly George Villiers, afterwards Earl of 
Clarendon. He and his broth( re, Hyde 
Romilly, Charles Austin and I, with some o 
met and agreed on a plan. AW* determined to m< 
once a fortnight firom November to June, at the 
Freemasons 1 Tavern, and we had soon a fine list 
of members, containing, along with several m< ml 
of Parliament, nearly all the mosi no1 
of the Cambridge Union and of the Oxford Unii 
Debating Society. It is curiously ive of 1 

tendencies of the time, thai our principal di | in 

recruiting for the Society was to find a sufficient 
number of Tory speakers. Almost all whom we 
could press into the service were Liberal* 
orders and degrees. Besides those already named, 
wo had Macaulay, Thirlwall, Praed, Lord Bowick, 
Samuel Wilberforce (afterwards Bishop of Oi 
Charles Poulett Thomson (afterwards Lord B 
ham), Edward and EenryLytton Bulwer, Fonblanque, 
and many others whom I cannot now recoiled 
who made themselves afterwards more or Less con- 
spicuous in public or literary lite. Nothing could seem 



YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. 127 

more promising. But when the time for action drew 
near, and it was necessary to fix on a President, and 
find somebody to open the first debate, none of our 
celebrities would consent to perform either office. Of 
the many who were pressed on the subject, the only 
one who could be prevailed on was a man of whom I 
knew very little, but who had taken high honours at 
Oxford and was said to have acquired a great ora- 
torical reputation there ; who some time afterwards 
became a Tory member of Parliament. He accord- 
ingly was fixed on, both for filling the President's 
chair and for making the first speech. The impor- 
tant day arrived ; the benches were crowded ; all our 
great speakers were present, to judge of, but not to 
help our efforts. The Oxford orator's speech was a 
complete failure. This threw a damp on the whole 
concern : the speakers who followed were few, and 
none of them did their best : the affair was a com- 
plete fiasco ; and the oratorical celebrities we had 
counted on went away never to return, giving to 
me at least a lesson in knowledge of the world. 
This unexpected breakdown altered my whole relation 
to the project. I had not anticipated taking a promi- 
nent part, or speaking much or often, particularly 
at first, but I now saw that the success of the scheme 
depended on the new men, and I put my shoulder to 
the wheel. I opened the second question, and from 
that time spoke in nearly every debate. It was very 



128 YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISE. 

uphill work for some time. The three Villiers and 
Romilly stuck to us for some time longer, but the 
patience of all the founders of the Society was at I 
exhausted, except me and Roebuck. In the sea- 
following, 1826-7, things began to mend We fa 
acquired two excellent Tory speakers,, Hayward and 
Shee (afterwards Sergeant Shee) : the Radical side 
was reinforced by Charles Buller, Cockburn, and 
others of the second generation of Cambridge Ben- 
thamites ; and with their and other OC 1 aid, 
and the two Tories as well as Roebuck and me for 
regular speakers, almost every d< ittts 
rangie between the "philosophic Radicals' 1 and the 
Tory lawyers; until our conflicts were talk 
several persons of note and consideration 

us. This happened still more in the Bub 
1828 and 1829, when the Coleridgians, in the | 
of Maurice and Sterling, made their appearance in 
the Society as a second Liberal and even Radi 
party, on totally different grounds from Benthamis 
and vehemently opposed to it; brii 
discussions the general doctrines and mode$of thought 
of the European reaction against the philosophy of I 
eighteenth century; and adding a third and very im- 
portant belligerent party to our a 9, which w< 
now no bad exponent of the movement of ( 
among the most cultivated part of the 
tion. Our debates were verv different from those of 



THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 129 

common debating societies, for they habitually con- 
sisted of the strongest arguments and most philosophic 
principles which either side was able to produce, 
thrown often into close and serve confutations of one 
another. The practice was necessarily very useful to 
us, and eminently so to me. I never, indeed, acquired 
real fluency, and had always a bad and ungraceful 
delivery ; but I could make myself listened to : and 
as I always wrote my speeches when, from the 
feelings involved, or the nature of the ideas to be 
developed, expression seemed important, I greatly 
increased my power of effective writing ; acquiring 
not only an ear for smoothness and rhythm, but a 
practical sense for telling sentences, and an immediate 
criterion of their telling property, by their effect on 
a mixed audience. 

The Society, and the preparation for it, together 
with the preparation for the morning conversations 
which were going on simultaneously, occupied the 
greater part of my leisure ; and made me feel it a 
relief when, in the spring of 1828, I ceased to write 
for the Westminster. The Review had fallen into 
difficulties. Though the sale of the first number 
had been very encouraging, the permanent sale had 
never, I believe, been sufficient to pay the expenses, 
on the scale on which the Review was carried on. 
Those expenses had been considerably, but not suffi- 
ciently, reduced. One of the editors, Southern, had 

K 



130 THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 

resigned ; and several of the writers, incli my 

father and me, who had been paid like other con- 
tributors for our earlier articles, had latterly writ! 
without payment. Nevertheless, the o funds 

were nearly or quite exhausted, and if the Revi 
was to be continued Bomi 

affairs had become indispensable. Myfath 1 I 

had several conferences with Bowling on tl. 
We were willing to do our utmost foi 
the Review as an organ of our opinions, but i 
under Bowling's editorship : while the impossibility 
of its any Longer support!] rded a 

ground On which, without 

propose to dispense with hi We and - 

of our Mends were prepai 

as unpaid writers, eit her findi] 

unpaid editor, or sharing 

But while this n< ' <n was ; 

Bowring's apparent acquiescence, he was carrying on 

another in a different quarter (with ( I Perp 

Thompson), of which we received th 

in a letter from Bowling as edit 
merely that an arrangement had heen D 
proposing to us to write for the next number, wi 
promise of payment. We did not di 
right to bring about, if he could, an an 
more favourable to himself than the 

proposed; but we thought the oo ich ho 






THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. 131 

had practised towards us, while seemingly entering 
into our own project, an affront : and even had we not 
thought so, we were indisposed to expend any more 
of our time and trouble in attempting to write up 
the Review under his management. Accordingly 
my father excused himself from writing ; though two 
or three years later, on great pressure, he did write 
one more political article. As for me, I positively 
refused. And thus ended my connexion with the 
original Westminster. The last article which I 
wrote in it had cost me more labour than any pre- 
vious ; but it was a labour of love, being a defence 
of the early French Revolutionists against the Tory 
misrepresentations of Sir Walter Scott, in the intro- 
duction to his Life of Napoleon. The number of 
books which I read for tins purpose, making notes 
and extracts — even the number I had to buy (for in 
those days there was no public or subscription library 
from which books of reference could be taken home), 
far exceeded the worth of the immediate object; but 
I had at that time a half-formed intention of writing 
a History of the French Revolution ; and though I 
never executed it, my collections afterwards were 
very useful to Carlyle for a similar purpose. 



CHAPTER V. 



A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. ONE STAGE 
ONWARD. 

T?OR some years after tins time I wrote very lit' 

and nothing regularly, for publication: 
great were the advantages which I derived from I 
intermission. It was of do common imp to 

me, at this period, fco be able to dig d matu 

my thoughts for my own mind only, withoul 
immediate eall forgiving them out in print, Had I 

gone on writing, it would have much disturbed I 
important transformation in my opinio 
racter, which took place during those yeaia i 
origin of this transformation, or at least the | 
by which I was prepared for it, can only be explaii 
by turning some distance back. 

From the winter of 1821, when I first I 
Bentham, and especially firom the comm 
the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be 
called an object in life ; to be a i 
world. My conception ot* my own hi 
entirely identified with this objt 
sympathies I wished for were these of tell w 



A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 133 

in this enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as 
many flowers as I could by the way ; but as a serious 
and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon, 
my whole reliance was placed on this ; and I was 
accustomed to felicitate myself on the certainty of a 
happy life which I enjoyed, through placing my hap- 
piness in something durable and distant, in which 
some progress might be always making, while it 
could never be exhausted by complete attainment. 
This did very well for several years, during which 
the general improvement going on in the world and 
the idea of myself as engaged with others in strug- 
gling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an 
interesting and animated existence. But the time 
came when I awakened from this as from a dream. 
It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state 
of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable 
to ; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excite- 
ment ; one of those moods when what is pleasure at 
other times, becomes insipid or indifferent ; the state, 
I should think, in which converts to Methodism 
usually are, when smitten by their first " conviction 
of sin." In this frame of mind it occurred to me to 
put the question directly to myself : " Suppose that 
all your objects in life were realized; that all the 
changes in institutions and opinions which you are 
looking forward to, could be completely effected a.t 
this very instant : would this be a great joy and 



134 A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 

happiness to you V And an irrepressible self-con- 
sciousness distinctly answered, "No! M At tl 
heart sank within me: the whole foundation on 
which my life was constructed wul AM 

happiness was to have been found in I 
pursuit of this end. The end had i 
and how could there ever again be any interest in 
the means ? I seemed to have nothing left to 
live for. 

At first I hoped that the cloud would | 
of itself; but it did not. A 
reign remedy for I be smaller \ 
effect on it. I awoke to a ren< wed 
the woful fact, I carried it wil all 

companies, into all occu] Baldly 

had power to cause me even a few min 

of it. For some months the cloud E 

thicker and thicker. The linos in Colerid 

"Dejection" — I was not then acquainted with them — 

exactly describe my case : 

" A grief without a p 
/ A drowr . unimpas 

^ Which liiuls do Hat m 

In word, or tear.* 1 

In vain T sought relief from my Jav< 
those memorials o^ past nobleness and r 
from which 1 had always hitherto drawn strength 
and animation. I read them now without ieelii 



A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 135 

or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm ; 
and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, 
and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself 
out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of 
what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to 
make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not 
have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that 
mine was not an interesting, or in any way respect- 
able distress. There was nothing in it to attract 
sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek 
it, would have been most precious. The words of 
Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my 
thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could 
build the faintest hope of such assistance. My 
father, to whom it would have been natural to me 
to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the 
last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked 
for help. Everything convinced me that he had no 
knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering 
from, and that even if he could be made to under- 
stand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. 
My education, which was wholly his work, had been 
conducted without any regard to the possibility of 
its ending in this result ; and I saw no use in giving 
him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, 
when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at 
all events, beyond the power of his remedies. Of 
other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had 



13G A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. , 

any hope of making my condition intelligible It 
was however abundantly intelligible to myself; and 
the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it ap- 
peared. 

My course of study had led me to believe, that all 
mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a 
good or of a bad kind, were the resull 
tion ; that we love one tiling, and hate another, take 
pleasure in one sort of action or mplation, i 

pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasur- 
able or painful ideas 1<> those things, from the effect of 
education or of experience, A< a corollary from 
this, 1 had always heard it maintained by i 
and was myself convinced, thai the i of edu 

tion should be to form the strong Na- 

tions of the salutary rlass J associations of pi 

with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of 

pain with all things hurtful to it. This doctrine 
appeared inexpugnable; but it now seemed to me, 
on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied them- 
selves but superficially with the means of forming 
and keeping up these salutary 
seemed to have trusted altogether to the old famili 
instruments, praise and blame, reward and punish- 
ment. Now, I did not doubt thai by thee 
begun early, and applied unremittingly, intense 
sociations of pain and pleasure, especially o( pain, 
might be created, and might produoe desires and 



A CRISIS EN" MY MENTAL HISTORY. 137 

aversions capable of lasting undiminished to the end 
of life. But there must always be something artifi- 
cial and casual in associations thus produced. The 
pains and pleasures thus forcibly associated with 
things, are not connected with them by any natural 
tie ; and it is therefore, I thought, essential to the 
durability of these associations, that they should 
have become so intense and inveterate as to be prac- 
tically indissoluble, before the habitual exercise of 
the power of analysis had commenced. For I now 
saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before 
received with incredulity — that the habit of analysis 
has a tendency to wear away the feelings : as indeed 
it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and 
the analysing spirit remains without its natural com- 
plements and correctives. The very excellence of 
analysis (I argued) is that it tends to weaken and 
undermine whatever is the result of prejudice ; that 
it enables us mentally to separate ideas which have 
only casually clung together : and no associations 
whatever could ultimately resist this dissolving force, 
were it not that we owe to analysis our clearest 
knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature; 
the real connexions between Things, not dependent 
on our will and feelings ; natural laws, by virtue of 
which, in many cases, one thing is inseparable from 
another in fact ; which laws, in proportion as they 
are clearly perceived and imaginatively realized, cause 



138 A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 

our ideas of things which, are always joined together 
in Nature, to cohere more and more closely in our 
thoughts. Analytic habits may thus even strengthen 
the associations between causes and effects, me;: 
and ends, but tend altogether to v Q those which 

are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeli 
They are therefore (I thought) favourable to prudence 
and clear-sightedness, but a perpetual worm at : 
root both of the }», and of the virtues ; ai 

above all, fearfully undermine all - od all 

pleasures, which are the effects of ition, thai is 

according to the theory I held, all except the purely 
physical and organic; of the entire in of 

which to make life desirable, no one hadac n- 

viction than I had T of human 

nature, by which, as i • d to me, I had b 

brought to my present All t q I 

looked up, were of opinion thai the pleasin m- 

pathy with human beings, and the js which in- 

the good of others, and especially of mankind on a 
large scale, the object of existence, wire th< 
and surest sources of happiness. I >f the truth of this I 
was convinced, but to know that a I 
make me happy if I had it, did not 
feeling. My education, I thought, had failed 
create these feelings in sufficient 
the dissolving influence of analysis, while the wh 
course of my intellectual cultivation had made pit 



A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 139 

cious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of 
my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left 
stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with 
a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail ; 
without any real desire for the ends which I had 
been so carefully fitted out to work for : no delight in 
virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in 
anything else. The fountains of vanity and ambi- 
tion seemed to have dried up within me, as completely 
as those of benevolence. I had had (as I reflected) 
some gratification of vanity at too early an age : I 
had obtained some distinction, and felt myself of 
some importance, before the desire of distinction and 
of importance had grown into a passion : and little 
as it was which I had attained, yet having been 
attained too early, like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, 
it had made me blase and indifferent to the pursuit. 
Thus neither selfish nor unselfish pleasures were 
pleasures to me. And there seemed no power in 
nature sufficient to begin the formation of my 
character anew, and create in a mind now irre- 
trievably analytic, fresh associations of pleasure with 
any of the objects of human desire. 

These were the thoughts which mingled with the 
dry heavy dejection of the melancholy winter of 
182G-7. During this time I was not incapable of my 
usual occupations. I went on with them mechani- 
cally, by the mere force of habit. I had been so 



140 A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY. 

drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise, that 1 
could still carry it on when all the spirit ne 

out of it. I even composed and spoke several 
speeches at the debatii . how. or with what 

degree of success, I know not. Of lour years con? 
tinual speaking at that society, this onlyy< 

of which I remember next to nothing. Tv 
Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers I have fou 
a true description of what I felt, were often in i 
thoughts, not at this time (for I had never n 
them), but in a later period of th te mental 

malady : 

" W<»rk wit licit f% 

In all probability m\ 

liar as I fancied it , and I doubt not I 

have passed through a similar state; but the idi - 

syncrasies of my education bad given to th 

phenomenon a special character, which made it seem 

the natural effect of causes that it was hardly possible 

for time to remove. I frequently asked myself, it' I 

could, or if 1 was bound to go on living, when life 

must be passed in this manner. I generally answ< 

to myself, that 1 did not think i could possibly 1 

it beyond a year. When, however, not mare t" 

half that duration of time bad elapsed, a small ra\ 

light broke in upon my gloom. [ was 

dentally, MarmonteTfl "Memoires," and came to I 



ONE STAGE ONWAED. 141 

passage which relates his fathers death, the dis- 
tressed position of the family, and the sudden inspi- 
ration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made 
them feel that he would be everything to them — 
would supply the place of all that they had lost. 
A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came 
over me, and I was moved to tears. From this 
moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression 
of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, 
was gone. I was no longer hopeless : I was not a 
stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the 
material out of which all worth of character, and all 
capacity for happiness, are made. Believed from my 
ever present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I 
gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life 
could again give me some pleasure ; that I could 
again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for 
cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in con- 
versation, in public affairs ; and that there was, once 
more, excitement, though of a moderate kind, in 
exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public 
good. Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I 
again enjoyed life : and though I had several relapses, 
some of which lasted many months, I never again 
was as miserable as I had been. 

The experiences of this period had two very 
marked effects on my opinions and character. In 
the first place, they led me to adopt a theory of life, 



142 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

very unlike that on which I had before acted, and 
having much in common with what at that time I 
certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-con- 
ness theory of Carlyle. I never, indeed, wavered in 
the conviction that happiness is I f all ru] 

of conduct, and the end of life, But I now thought 
that this end was only to be attained by not maki 
it the direct end Those only are happy (I thought) 
who have their minds fixed on some 
than their own happiness ; on the happiness of others, 
on the improvement of mankind, even <■: I or 

pursuit, followed not as a i 
ideal end. Aiming thus al something else, they fi 
happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such 
was now my theory) are sufficienl I a 

pleasant thing, when they are taken . with- 

out being made a principal object, I >noe d 
so, and they are immediately felt to K 
They will not hoar a scrutinizing examination* A 
yourself whethe* you are happy, and you cease to be 
SO. The only ehance is to treat, not happint B8, I 
some end external to it, as the pur; 
your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, \ 
interrogation, exhaust themselves on that ; 
otherwise fortunately crrcuftistanoed you wi 
happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelli 
on it or thinking about it, without either fi 
it in imagination, or putting it to flight bj 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 143 

questioning. This theory now became the basis of 
my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the 
best theory for all those who have but a moderate 
degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment, 
t is, for the great majority of mankind. 
The other important change which my opinions at 
this time underwent, was that I, for the first time, 
gave its proper place, among the prime necessities 
of human well-being, to the internal culture of the 
individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive 
importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, 
and the training of the human being for speculation 
and for action. 

I had now learnt by experience that the passive 
susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as 
the active capacities, and required to be nourished 
and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an 
instant, lose sight of, or undervalue, that part of the 
truth which I had seen before ; I never turned re- 
creant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the 
power and practice of analysis as an essential condi- 
tion both of individual and of social improvement. But 
I thought that it had consequences which required 
to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation 
with it. The maintenance of a due balance among 
the faculties, now seemed to me of primary impor- 
tance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of 
the cardinal- points in my ethical and philosophical 



144 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in 
an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable 
of being instrumental to that object. 

I now began to find meaning in the things wl 
I had read or heard about the importance of poetry 
and art as instruments of human culture. But it 
was some time longer before I began to know this 
by personal experience. The only one of the ima 
native arts in which I had from childhood taken 
pleasure, was music ; the beerf effect of which (and in 
this it surpasses perhaps every other art) c i in 

exciting enthusiasm ; in winding up to a high pitch 
those feelings of an elevated kind which an 
in the character, but td which tl. 
aglow and a fervour, which, though transitory at 
utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at 
other times. This effect of music 1 had ex- 

perienced ; but like all my pleasurabl ptibilil 

it was suspended during the gloomy period. I I 
sought relief again and again from this quarter, hut 
found none. After the tide had turned, and I \ 
in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by 
music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this 
time first became acquainted withWeber's Obei 
and the extreme pleasure which I drew 
delicious melodies did me good, by 
a source of pleasure to which I was as sus 
as ever. The good, however, was much i] 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 145 

by the thought, that the pleasure of music (as is quite 
true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere 
tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be 
revived by intermittence, qr fed by continual novelty. 
And it is very characteristic both of my then state, 
and of the general tone of my mind at this period of 
my life, that I was seriously tormented by the 
thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. 
The octave consists only of five tones and two semi- 
tones, which can be put together in only a limited 
number of ways, of which but a small proportion are 
beautiful : most of these, it seemed to me, must have 
been already discovered, and there could not be room 
for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to 
strike out, as these had done, entirely new and sur- 
passingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source of 
anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that uf 
the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun 
should be burnt out. It was, however, connected 
with the best feature in my character, and the only 
good point to be found in my very unromantic and 
in no way honourable distress. For though my de- 
jection, honestly looked at, could not be called other 
than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, 
of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of man- 
kind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could 
not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw 
in my life, must be a flaw in life itself ; that the 

L 



146 OXE STAGE OXWARJX 

question was, whether, if the reformers of society and 
government could succeed in their objects, and every 
person in the community were free and in 
physical comfort, the }>1< of lif no 

longer kept up by strug 

to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I c rcdd - • my 
way to some better hope than this for human happi- 
ness in general, my dejection must continue ; but that 
if I could see such an outlet .1 - raid then look on the 
world with pleasure; cont> ■".: ■.■ - I 

concerned, with any lair share of the 

This state of my tl the 

fact of my reading Wordsworth for I 
the autumn of L 828), an important i in my li 

I took up the collection of his poems from curi 
with no expectation of mental n 
I had before resorted to poetry with that hope. In 
the worst period of my depression, I had n 
through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try 
whether a poet, whose peculiar depaitmi sup- 

posed to be that of the intenser feelings, could rou 
any feeling in me. As might be exj 
good from this reading, but the reverse, T 
state of mind * i like I he 

lament of a man who had worn out all pleasure* 
who seemed to think that life, to all wh 
the good things of it, must n< ily be the vapid, 

uninteresting thingwhich I lound it. His Harold 

a 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 147 

and Manfred had the same burden on them which I 
had ; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any 
comfort from the vehement sensual passion of his 
Giaours, or the sullenness of his Laras. But while 
Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition, 
Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked 
into the Excursion two or three years before, and 
found little in it ; and I should probably have found 
as little, had I read it at this time. But the miscel- 
laneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 
(to which little of value was added in the latter part 
of the author s life), proved to be the precise tiling 
for my mental wants at that particular juncture. 

In the first place, these poems addressed them- 
selves powerfully to one of the strongest of my 
pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects 
and natural scenery ; to which I had been indebted 
not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but 
quite recently for relief from one of my longest re- 
lapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty 
over me, there was a foundation laid for taking plea- 
sure in Wordsworth's poetry ; the more so, as his 
scenery lies mostly among mountains, which, owing 
to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of 
natural beauty. But Wordsworth would never have 
had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed 
before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. 
Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and 

L 2 



143 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

a very second-rate landscape does it more ef- 
fectually than any poet. What made Woi 
worth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, 
that they expressed, not mere outward 1 
but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by 
feeling, under the excitement of beauty. Tl 
seemed to be the very culture of the i< which 

I was in quest of. In them I ed to draw from 

a source of inward joy, of Bympatheti 
ginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all 
human beings ; which had no connexion with strng 
or imperfection, bul would be mi rry 

improvement in the physical or social condition of 
mankind. From them I seemed to Learn what 
be the perennial Bourcea of happiness, when all * 
greater evils of life shall have been 
I felt myself at once better and happii . as 1 i mo 
under their influence, There have certainly been, 
even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth ; 
but poetry of deeper and loftier feelh 
have done for me at that time what his did. I 
needed to be made to feel that there was real, per- 
manent happiness in tranquil contemplation. V> 
worth taught me this, not only without turni 
away from, but with a greatly increased h in 

the common feelings and common destiny of hun 
beinga And the delight which these poems gave n . 
proved that with culture of this sert. there v. 
nothing to dread from tinned habit 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 149 

analysis. At the conclusion of the Poems came the 
famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, " Intimations of 
Immortality :" in which, along with more than his 
usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along 
with the two passages of grand imagery but bad 
philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had 
had similar experience to mine ; that he also had felt 
that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life 
was not lasting ; but that he had sought for compen- 
sation, and found it, in the way in which he was 
now teaching me to find it. The result was that I 
gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual 
depression, and was never again subject to it. I long 
continued to value Wordsworth less according to his 
intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had 
done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he 
may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, 
possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But un- 
poetical natures are precisely those which require 
poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is 
much more fitted to give, than poets who are in- 
trinsically far more poets than he. 

It so fell out that the merits of Wordsworth were 
the occasion of my first public declaration of my new 
way of thinking, and separation from those of my 
habitual companions who had not undergone a similar 
change. The person with whom at that time I was 
most in the habit of comparing notes on such subjects 
was Roebuck, and I induced him to read Woixb- 



150 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

worth, in whom he also at first seemed to find much 
to admire : but I, like most Wordsworthians, threw 
myself into strong antagonism to Byron, both as a poet 
and as to his influence on the character. Roebuck, 
all whose instincts were those of action and st i 
had, on the contrary, a str lish and great admi- 

ration of Byron, whose writings he regarded as the 
poetry of human life, while Wordsworth's, accord: 
to him, was that of il<> We 

agreed to have the fight out at our Debating S 
where we accordingly discussed for two evenings the 
comparative merits of Byron and Wordsworth, pro- 
pounding and illustrating by long p 
respective theories of poetry: Sterling in a 

brilliant speech, putting forward his particular 
theory. This was the first deb any v. 

subject in which Roebuck and I had beenonopposi 
sides. The schism between us widened from this 
time more and more, though we continued for some 
years longer to be companions. In the beginnj 
our cliief divergence related to the cultivation of 
the feelings. Roebuck was in many i - very 

different from the vulgar notion of a Benthamite 
Utilitarian. He was a lover of poetry and of m 
of the line arts. He took great pleasure in music, in 
dramatic performances, ially in painting 

himself drew and designed landscapes with 
facility and beaut v. But he never could be made 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 151 

see that these things have any value as aids in the 
formation of character. Personally, instead of being, 
as Benthamites are supposed to be, void of feeling, 
he had very quick and strong sensibilities. But, like 
most Englishmen who have feelings, he found his 
feelings stand very much in his way. He was much 
more susceptible to the painful sympathies than to 
the pleasurable, and looking for his happiness else- 
where, he wished that his feelings should be deadened 
rather than quickened. And, in truth, the English 
character, and English social circumstances, make it 
so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exer- 
cise of the sympathies, that it is not wonderful if 
they count for little in an Englishman's scheme of 
life. In most other countries the paramount impor- 
tance of the sympathies as a constituent of individual 
happiness is an axiom, taken for granted rather than 
needing any formal statement ; but most English 
thinkers almost seem to regard them as necessary 
evils, required for keeping mens actions benevolent 
and compassionate. Roebuck was, or appeared to be, 
this kind of Englishman. He saw little good in any 
cultivation of the feelings, and none at all in culti- 
vating them through the imagination, which he 
thought was only cultivating illusions. It was in 
vain I urged on him that the imaginative emotion 
which an idea, when vividly conceived, excites 
in us, is not an illusion but a fact, as real as any 



152 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

of the other qualities of objects ; and far from 
implying anything erroneous and delusive in our 
mental apprehension of the object, is quite c nt 

with the most accurate knowledge and most peril 
practical recognition of all its phye -1 intellectual 

laws and relations. The intent ag of the 

beauty of a cloud lighted by th< no 

hindrance to my knowing that the cloud >ur 

of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a 
state of suspension ; and \ am just as li! 
for, and act on, these physical laws 
occasion to do so, as if I I pableof] 

ceiving any distinction bei ween 1 

While my intimacy with K diminished, I 

fell more and more into friendly intercourse with our 
Coleridgian adversaries in the 8 ick 

.Maurice and John Sterling 3 both I SO 

well known, the former by his wiitinge 
through the biographies by Bare and Carlyle. I tf 
these two friends, Maurice was the thii 
the orator, and impassioned ex] 
which, at this period, were al: /uvlv formed 

hini by Maurice. 

With Maurice T had for some time been acquail 
through ECyton Tooke, who had known hill 
bridge, and although my dis ith him w< 

almost always disputes, 1 had carried away fi 
them much that helped to build up my 



OXE STAGE ONWARD, 153 

thought, in the same way as I was deriving much 
from Coleridge, and from the writings of Goethe and 
other German authors which I read during these 
years. I have so deep a respect for Maurices character 
and purposes, as well as for his great mental gifts, 
that it is with some unwillingness I say anything 
which may seem to place him on a less high eminence 
than I would gladly be able to accord to him. But 
I have always thought that there was more intellec- 
tual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of 
my contemporaries. Few of them certainly have had 
so much to waste. Great powers of generalization, 
rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception 
of important and unobvious truths, served him not 
for putting something better into the place of the 
worthless heap of received opinions on the great sub- 
jects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that 
the Church of England had known everything from 
the first, and that all the truths on the ground of 
which the Church and orthodoxy have been attacked 
(many of which he saw as clearly as any one) are not 
only consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles, but are 
better understood and expressed in those Articles 
than by any one who rejects them. I have never 
been able to find any other explanation of this, than by 
attributing it to that timidity of conscience, combined 
with original sensitiveness of temperament, which 
has so often driven highly gifted men into Romanism 



154 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

from the need of a firmer support than they can find 

in the independent conclusions of their own judgment, 

Any more vulgar kind of timidity no one who knew 

Maurice would ever think of imputing to him, even 

if he had not given public proof of his freedom from 

it, by his ultimate collision with some of the opini 

commonly regarded as orthodox, and by I 

origination of the Christ i.n list movement. T 

nearest parallel to him, in a moral point of view, 

Coleridge, to whom, in merely intellectual power, 

apart from poetical genius, I think him i Uy 

superior. At this time, h 

described as a disciple ofColeridg - a 

disciple of Coleridge and of him. T ona 

which were taking place in my old opi] 

some points of contact with h Mam ' 

and Stirling were of CO] my d( 

ment. With Sterling 1 soon becam 

and was more attached to him than 1 ha en 

to any other man. He was indeed 

loveable of men. His frank, cordial, i nd 

expansive character ; a love of truth alike ecu n ' 

in the highest things and the humblest : 8 

and ardent nature which threw Itself with 

into the opinions it adopted, but - s 

justice to the doctrines and the men it was 

to, as to make war on what ii 

and an equal devotion to the two cardi t 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 155 

Liberty and Duty, formed a combination of qualities 
as attractive to me, as to all others who knew him as 
well as I did. With his open mind and heart, he found 
no difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf 
which as yet divided our opinions. He told me how 
he and others had looked upon me (from hearsay in- 
formation), asa a made " or manufactured man, having 
had a certain impress of opinion stamped on me which 
I could only reproduce ; and what a change took place 
in his feelings when he found, in the discussion on 
Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all 
which that name implies, " belonged " to me as much 
as to him and his friends. The failure of his health 
soon scattered all his plans of life, and compelled him 
to live at a distance from London, so that after the 
first year or two of our acquaintance, we only saw each 
other at distant intervals. But (as he said himself in 
one of his letters to Carlyle) when we did meet it 
was like brothers. Though he was never, in the full 
sense of the word, a profound thinker, his openness of 
mind, and the moral courage in which he greatly 
surpassed Maurice, made him outgrow the dominion 
which Maurice and Coleridge had once exercised 
over his intellect ; though he retained to the last a 
great but discriminating admiration of both, and 
towards Maurice a warm affection. Except in that 
short and transitory phasis of his life, during which 
he made the mistake of becoming a clergyman, his 



156 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

mind was ever progressive : and the advance lie 

always seemed to have made when I saw him af* 

an interval, made me apply to him what ( ■ 

of Schiller, "er hatte eine furchtliche Fortschri 

tung." He and I started from 

almost as wide apart a but tli 

between us was always diminishing : if 1 m 

towards some of his opinions, he, duri 

was constantly approximati] j e and more to several 

of mine: and if he had lived, and had health e 

vigour to prosecute his ever assidu If-cultti 

there is no knowing how much further thissponl 

neous assimilation might have pn oeeded. 

After L829 I withdrew fi 
Debating Society. I had h 

making, and was glad to cany Ml my pa 

and meditations without any immediate rail for »»ut- 

ward assertion of their resulta I found the fabric 

my old and taught opini ny 

fresh places, and 1 never allowed it to fall to | 

but was incessantly occupied in weaving I 

never, in the course vi 1 my to 

remain, for ever rt a tin 

tied. When I had taken in 

not rest till 1 had adju> 

opinions, and ascertained exactly 1 

ought to extend in modifying or sup< 

The oonflicts which 1 had so often had a in 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 157 

defending the theory of government laid down in 
Bentham's and my fathers writings, and the ac- 
quaintance I had obtained with other schools of 
political thinking, made me aware of many things 
which that doctrine, professing to be a theory of 
government in general, ought to have made room for, 
and did not. But these things, as yet, remained with 
me rather as corrections to be made in applying the 
theory to practice, than as defects in the theory. I 
felt that politics could not be a science of specific 
experience ; and that the accusations against the 
Benthamic theory of being a theory, of proceeding a 
priori by way of general reasoning, instead of Baconian 
experiment, showed complete ignorance of Bacons 
principles, and of the necessary conditions of experi- 
mental investigation. At this juncture appeared in 
the Edinburgh Pieview, Macaulay s famous attack on 
my father s Essay on Government. This gave me 
much to think about. I saw that Macaulay 's con- 
ception of the logic of politics was erroneous ; that 
he stood up for the empirical mode of treating poli- 
tical phenomena, against the philosophical ; that even 
in physical science his notions of philosophizing 
might have recognised Kepler, but would have ex- 
cluded Newton and Laplace. But I could not help 
feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an 
error for which the writer, at a later period, made the 
most ample and honourable amends), there was truth 



158 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

in several of his strictures on my father's treatment 
of the subject; that my fathers premis - lly 

too narrow, and included but a small nun. 
the general truths, on which, in p 
consequences depend. Identity of intei 
the governing body and the community at 
not, in any practical sense which can be at1 I to 

it, the only thing on which good go 
depends ; neither can this identity of it. be 

secured by the mere conditions of i el I v. 

not at all satisfied with the mode in which my fat] 
met the criticisms of Macaulay. Be did a I 

thought he ought t<> have done, justify himself by 
Baying, "I was n<»t writing a scientific I on 

polities, I was writing an argument fi)f parliam 

tary reform/' lie treated Macanla 

simply irrational; an attack upon t 

faculty; an example of the Baying of Hobbes, t. 

when reason is against a man, a man will ! 

reason. This made me think that i 

really something mere fundamentally 

my fathers conception of philosop] 

applicable to polities, than 1 had bil 

there was. But I did n< 

the error might be. At last n flashed upon me all 

once in the course of other studies. In the early 

part of 1830 I had begun to put en paper the id 

on bogie (chiefly on the distinctions amoi 



'one stage onward. 159 

and the import of Propositions) which had been sug- 
gested and in part worked out in the morning con- 
versations already spoken of. Having secured these 
thoughts from being lost, I pushed on into the other 
parts of the subject, to try whether I could do any- 
thing further towards clearing up the theory of logic 
generally. I grappled at once with the problem of 
Induction, postponing that of Reasoning, on the 
ground that it is necessary to obtain premises before 
we can reason from them. Now, Induction is mainly 
a process for finding the causes of effects : and in 
attempting to fathom the mode of tracing causes and 
effects in physical science, I soon saw that in the 
more perfect of the sciences, we ascend, by generaliza- 
tion from particulars, to the tendencies of causes 
considered singly, and then reason downward from 
those separate tendencies, to the effect of the same 
causes when combined. I then asked myself, what 
is the ultimate analysis of this deductive process ; 
the common theory of the syllogism evidently throw- 
ing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from 
Hobbes and my father) being to study abstract prin- 
ciples by means of the best concrete instances I could 
find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics, occurred 
to me as the most complete example of the logical 
process I was investigating. On examining, accord- 
ingly, what the mind does when it applies the prin- 
ciple of the Composition of Forces, I found that it 



160 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

performs a simple act of addition. It adds the sepa- 
rate effect of the one force to the separate effect of 
the other, and puts down the sum of these separate 
effects as the joint effect. But La this a legitime 
process ? In dynamics, and in all the mat lieu 
branches of physics, it is ; but in some ol . as 

in chemistry, it is not ; and I then recollected ii. 
something not unlike this was '1 out as one of 

the distinctions between chei 1 mechanic 

phenomena, in t lie introduction to that favourite of 
my boyhood, Thompson's System of Chemistry. 

Tliis distinction at once made my mind clear as to 

what was perplexing me b 

of politics. I now saw. the 

live or experimental, according as, in the p 

deals with, the effects of c 

or are not the sums of the i which the same 

causes produce when separa' It followed that 

politics must be a deductive science. It tic 

peared, that both Macaulay and my father w< 

wrong ; the one in assimilating the method of philoe 

phizing in politics to the purely experimental d 

of chemistry; while the other, though right in 

a deductive method, had made a w 

one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the 

appropriate process, that of the deduct 

of natural philosophy, but the inap] 

pure geometry, which, not being a - 

tion at all. does uot require or admit y sum- 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 161 

ming-up of effects. A foundation was thus laid in 
my thoughts for the principal chapters of what 1 
afterwards published on the Logic of the Moral 
Sciences ; and my new position in respect to my old 
political creed, now became perfectly definite. 

If I am asked, what system of political philosophy 
I substituted for that which, as a philosophy, I had 
abandoned, I answer, No system : only a conviction 
that the true system was something much more com- 
plex and many-sided than I had previously had any 
idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a set oi 
model institutions, but principles from which the in- 
stitutions suitable to any given circumstances might be 
deduced. The influences of European, that is to say, 
Continental, thought, and especially those of the 
reaction of the nineteenth century against the 
eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me. They 
came from various quarters : from the writings of Cole- 
ridge, which I had begun to read with interest even 
before the change in my opinions ; from theColeridgians 
with whom I was in personal intercourse ; from what I 
had read of Goethe ; from Carlyle's early articles in 
the Edinburgh and Foreign Reviews, though for a 
long time I saw nothing in these (as my father saw 
nothing in them to the last) but insane rhapsody. 
From these sources, and from the acquaintance I kept 
up with the French literature of the time, I derived, 
among other ideas which the general turning upside 

M 



1G2 OXE STAGE ONWARD. 

down of the opinions of European thinkers had 
brought uppermost, these in particular: That the 
human mind has a certain order of possible progn 
in which some things must precede others, an or. 
which governments and public ins ra can mod 

to some, but not to an unlimited extent : that allqn 
tions of political institutions are relative, not al- 
and that different stages of human ] nly 
will have, but ought to have, different institutioi 
that government is always rather in the hands, ot 
passing into the band-, of whl 
power in society, and that what this power i 
not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: 
that any general theory or philosophy of | 
supposes a previous theory of human j 
that this is the same thing with a philosophy 
history. These opinions, true in the main, were held 
in an exaggerated and violent manner by th< 
with whom I was now most accustomed to 
notes, and who, as usual with a reaction, ed 
that half of the truth which the thh 
eighteenth century saw. But though, at one peri 
of my progress, I for some time undervalued tl 
great century, I never joined in the 
it, but kept as firm hold of one side of the truth as I 
took of the other. The fight between tl tli 
centuty and the eighteenth always reminded I 
the battle about the shield, one Bide of which v. ite 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 163 

and the other black. I marvelled at the blind rage 
with which the combatants rushed against one another. 
I applied to them, and to Coleridge himself, many of 
Coleridge's sayings about half truths ; and Goethe's 
device, " many-sidedness," was one which I would 
most willingly, at this period, have taken for mine. 

The writers by whom, more than by any others, a 
new mode of political thinking was brought home to 
me, were those of the St. Simonian school in 
France. In 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted 
with some of their writings. They were then only 
in the earlier stages of their speculations. They had 
not yet dressed out their philosophy as a religion, 
nor had they organized their scheme of Socialism. 
They were just beginning to question the principle 
of hereditary property. I was by no means prepared 
to go with them even this length ; but I was greatly 
struck with the connected view which they for the 
first time presented to me, of the natural order of 
human progress ; and especially with their division of 
all history into organic periods and critical periods. 
During the organic periods (they said) mankind 
accept with firm conviction some positive creed, claim- 
ing jurisdiction over all their actions, and containing 
more or less of truth and adaptation to the needs of 
humanity. Under its influence they make all the 
progress compatible with the creed, and finally out- 
grow it ; when a period follows of criticism and nega- 

M 2 



164 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

tion, in which mankind lose their old convictions 
without acquiring any new ones, of a general or 
authoritative character, except the conviction that 
the old are false. The period of Greek and 1 
polytheism, so long as really b in 1 y instructed 

Greeks and Romans, was an organic : . suc- 

ceeded by the critical or s< f the 

Greek philosophers. Another organic period came 
in with Christianity. The correspond] itical 

period began with the II- format] 
since, still lasts, and cannot i until a 

new organic period hi 1 by I 

triumph of a yet more ad\ 1. Tl 

I knew, were not peculiar to the s; on 

the contrary, they were tl. 
Europe, or at Least of ( I 
had never, to my knowledge, been b 
systematized as by these writ* 

ing characteristics of a critical | illy 

set forth ; fori was not then acquainted with Fichl a 
Lectures on ''The Characte of the Pi 

Age/' In Carlyle, indeed, I found 
tions of an " age of unbelief,' 1 and of 
as such, which [, like most people a: 
posed to be passionate pn I ste : :. fav< or 
modes of belief But all tli - true in 

denunciations, 1 thought that I found more call 
and philosophically staled by the St S 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 165 

Among tlieir publications, too, there was one which 
seemed to me far superior to the rest ; in which the 
general idea was matured into something much more 
definite and instructive. This was an early work of 
Auguste Comte, who then called himself, and ev r en 
announced himself in the title-page as, a pupil of 
Saint Simon. In this tract M. Comte first put forth 
the doctrine, which he afterwards so copiously illus- 
trated, of the natural succession of three stages in 
every department of human knowledge : first, the 
theological, next the metaphysical, and lastly, the 
positive stage ; and contended, that social science 
must be subject to the same law; that the feudal 
and Catholic system was the concluding phasis of the 
theological state of the social science, Protestantism 
the commencement, and the doctrines of the French 
Revolution the consummation, of the metaphysical ; 
and that its positive state was yet to come. This 
doctrine harmonized well with my existing notions, 
to which it seemed to give a scientific shape. I 
already regarded the methods of physical science as 
the proper models for political. But the chief benefit 
which I derived at this time from the trains of 
thou glit suggested by the St. Simonians and by 
Comte, was, that I obtained a clearer conception 
than ever before of the peculiarities of an era of 
transition in oj3inion, and ceased to mistake the 
moral and intellectual characteristics of such an era, 



166 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

for the normal attributes of humanity. I looked 
forward, through the present age of loud disputes 
bat generally weak convictions, to a future which 
shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the 
best qualities of the organic | ; unchecked 

liberty of thought, unbounded fo of individual 

action in all modes not hurtful to others; hut a] 
convictions as to what is righl and wron il and 

pernicious, deeply engraven on the feelings by early 
education and general unanimity of Bentao 
so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exi- 
gencies of lit*', thai they shall not, like all form* 
present creeds, religious, ethical, and political, require 
to be periodically tin-own off and replaced by otfo 

M. Comte soon left the St. Sim< I I lost 

sight of him and his writings for a number of 
But the St. Simonians [continued to cultivate, 1 
kept au courant of their pr by one of their m 

enthusiastic disciples, M. Gustave d'Eichthal, ? 
about that time passed a considerable interval in 
England I was introduced to their chiefs, Bazard b 
En Ian tin, in 1 830; and as long as their public teachi 
and proselytism continued, 1 
they wrote. Their criticisms on ti. 
of Liberalism seemed to me full of imp 
and it was partly by their writings that 
were opened to the very limited and ten !ue 

of the old political economy, which assuuM 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 167 

property and inheritance as indefeasible facts, and 
freedom of production and exchange as the dernier 
mot of social improvement. The scheme gradually 
unfolded by the St. Simonians, under which the 
labour and capital of society would be managed for the 
general account of the community, every individual 
being required to take a share oi labour, either as 
thinker, teacher, artist, or producer, all being classed 
according to their capacity, and remunerated according 
to their work, appeared to me a far superior descrip- 
tion of Socialism to Owen's. Their aim seemed to me 
desirable and rational, however their means might 
be inefficacious ; and though I neither believed in the 
practicability, nor in the beneficial operation of their 
social machinery, I felt that the proclamation of 
such an ideal of human society could not but tend to 
give a beneficial direction to the efforts of others to 
bring society, as at present constituted, nearer to some 
ideal standard. I honoured them most of all for what 
they have been most cried down for — the boldness and 
freedom from prejudice with which they treated the 
subject of family, the most important of any, and 
needing more fundamental alterations than remain to 
be made in any other great social institution, but on 
which scarcely any reformer has the courage to touch. 
In proclaiming the perfect equality of men and women, 
and an entirely new order of things in regard to their 
relations with one another, the St. Simonians, in 



168 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

common with Owen and Fourier, Lave entitled 
themselves to the grateful remembrance of future 
generations. 

In giving an account of this period of my life, I 
have only specified such of my new imp] 
appeared to me, both at th< and since, to be a 

kind of turning points, markii inite ] - in 

my mode of thought But these fe^ 
give a very insufficient Idea of the quart it v of think- 
ing which 1 carried on respecting a host oi 
during these yeana of transition. Much of this 
true, consisted in rediscovering thing! all 

the world, which 1 had previously disbelieved, or 
disregarded But the rediscovery was to ri 
discovery, giving me [denary p 
not as traditional platitudes, but fresh from tl 
source: audit seldom failed to place them in >«»me 
new light, by which they were reconciled with, b 
seemed to confirm while they modified, the un- 
less generally known which lay in my early oj : 
and in no essential part of which I at any time 
wavered. All my now think 

dation of these more deeply and . while 

often removed misapprehension and confusion of 
ideas which had perverted their effect I tmple, 

during the later returns of my dejection, th< 
ol' what is called Philosophical NV 
my existence like an incubus. I felt as if 1 i 



ONE STAGE ONWAKD. 1G9 

scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of ante- 
cedent circumstances ; as if my character and that of 
all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond 
our control, and was wholly out of our own power. I 
often said to myself, what a relief it would be if I 
could disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of 
character by circumstances ; and remembering the 
wish of Fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to 
governments, that it might never be forgotten by kings, 
nor remembered by subjects, I said that it would be a 
blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be believed 
by all quoad the characters of others, and disbelieved 
in regard to their own. I pondered painfully on the 
subject, till gradually I saw light through it. I 
perceived, that the word Necessity, as a name for the 
doctrine of Cause and Effect applied to human action, 
carried with it a misleading association ; and that 
this association was the operative force in the depress- 
ing and paralysing influence which I had experienced : 
I saw that though our character is formed by circum- 
stances, our own desires can do much to shape those 
circumstances ; and that what is really inspiriting and 
ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction 
that we have real power over the formation of our 
own character ; that our will, by influencing some of 
our circumstances, can modify our future habits or 
capabilities of willing. All this was entirely con- 
sistent with the doctrine of circumstances, or rather, 



170 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

was that doctrine itself, properly understood. From 

that time I drew in my own mind, a clear di ion 

between the doctrine of circui disco ; 

discarding altogether the mi \ word N 

The theory, which I now for th< itly 

apprehended, ceased altogether to b 

and besides the relief to my spirits, I no long 

suffered under the burden, so heavy to one v. 

aims at being a reformer in opini thinking one 

doctrine true, and the contrary doctrine morally 

beneficial The train erf though! * hich b 

me from this dilemma, Beemed to me, b 

fitted to render a similar service to others; audit 

now fonns the chapter on Liberty and v . in 

the concluding Book of my System of L 

Again, in politics, though 1 no loi 
doctrine of the Essay on Government i 
theory; though I ceased to consider i 
democracy as an absolute principle, and n 
as a question of time, place, and circuinsi 
I now looked upon the choice of political instituti 
as a moral and educational qi than i 

of material interests, thinking that it 
decided mainly by the consideration, w] 
provement in life and cultu c in ord 

the people concerned, as the condition d 
further prcgress, and what institutioi 
likely to promote that; licverthch ss, this change in 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. . 171 

the premises of my political philosophy did not alter 
my practical political creed as to the requirements of 
my own time and country. I was as much as ever a 
Radical and Democrat for Europe, and especially for 
England. I thought the predominance of the aris- 
tocratic classes, the noble and the rich, in the English 
constitution, an evil worth any struggle to get rid of; 
not on account of taxes, or any such comparatively 
small inconvenience, but as the great demoralizing 
agency in the country. Demoralizing, first, because 
it made the conduct of the Government an example 
of gross public immorality, through the predominance 
of private over public interests in the State, and the 
abuse of the powers of legislation for the advantage 
of classes. Secondly, and in a still greater degree," 
because the respect of the multitude always attaching 
itself principally to that which, in the existing state 
of society, is the chief passport to power ; and under 
English institutions, riches, hereditary or acquired, 
being the almost exclusive source of political im- 
portance ; riches, and the signs of riches, were almost 
the only things really respected, and the life of the 
people was mainly devoted to the pursuit of them. 
I thought, that while the higher and richer classes 
held the power of government, the instruction 
and improvement of the mass of the people were 
contrary to the self-interest of those classes, because 
tending to render the people more powerful for 



172 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

throwing off the yoke : but if the democracy obtained 
a large, and perhaps the principal share, in the 
governing power, it would become the interest of I 
opulent classes to promote their education, in ord 
to ward off really mischievous errors, and i lv 

those which would lead to unjust violations of 
property. On these grounds I was not only as 
ardent as ever for democratic institutions, but 
earnestly hoped that Owenite, St Simonian, ; 
all other anti-property doctris bt spread wid< 

among the poorer cl Dot that 1 thought th< 

doctrines true, or desired thai tJ >uld be acted 

on. but in order that the high 
made to see that they had more b from the] 

when uneducated, than when educated 

In this frame of mind the F Revo! 

July found me. It roused my utmost enthusi 
gave me, as it were, a new existence. 1 went at 0] 
to Paris, was introduced to Lafayette, and laid the 
groundwork of the intercourse I afterwards kept up 
with several of the active chiefs of the ex 
popular party. Alter my return I enter* 
a writer, into the political difiCUSi : 

which soon became still mare exciting, 1 
in of Lord (-ivy's Ministry, and the pr 
Reform Bill. For the next few years I wi 
copiously in newspapers. It waa about this time 
that Fonblanque, who had for some time written the 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 173 

political articles in the Examiner, became tlie pro- 
prietor and editor of the paper. It is not forgotten 
with what verve and talent, as well as fine wit, he 
carried it on, during the whole period of Lord Grey's 
Ministry, and what importance it assumed as the 
principal representative, in the newspaper press, of 
Radical opinions. The distinguishing character of 
the paper was given to it entirely by his own articles, 
which formed at least three-fourths of all the original 
writing: contained in it : but of the remaining fourth 
I contributed during those years a much larger share 
than any one else. I wrote nearly all the articles on 
French subjects, including a weekly summary of 
French politics, often extending to considerable 
length ; together with many leading articles on 
general politics, commercial and financial legislation, 
and any miscellaneous subjects in which I felt in- 
terested, and which were suitable to the paper, 
including occasional reviews of books. Mere news- 
paper articles on the occurrences or questions of the 
moment, gave no opportunity for the development of 
any general mode of thought ; but I attempted, in 
the beginning of 1831, to embody in a series of 
articles, headed " The Spirit of the Age/' some of 
my new opinions, and especially to point out in the 
character of the present age, the anomalies and 
evils characteristic of the transition from a system 
of opinions which had worn out, to another only in 



174 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

process of being formed. These articles were, I fancy, 

lumbering in style, and not lively or striking ei 

to be. at any time, ace- 

but had they been far more 8 U, at that 

particular moment, when 

were impending, and ei .ill minn 

(Missions were ill-timed, and mk 

The only effect which I know to hav< 

by them, was thai ( larlyle, then livii 

part of Scotland, read th( m in hi 

saying to himself " 1 1< i 

a new Mysi ic," inquired on i 

autumn respecting their inqui 

which was the imm< dial e f our 

personally acquainted 

I have already menl ion< d ( larl) h 
as one ol' the channels through which 1 
influences which enlarged my early narrow 
but 1 do not think that those writings, b; 
would ever have had any effed on mj 
Whai truths they contained, though 
which I was already receiving 1; 
were presented in a form and vesture 1< se 
than any other to give then) a 
as mine had been. Ti tned a hi 

and German metaphysics, in which aim 
clear thine- was a s; rong ani 
opinions which were the ba& y mode of thougl 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 175 

religious scepticism, utilitarianism, the doctrine of 
circumstances, and the attaching any importance to 
democracy, logic, or political economy. Instead of 
my having been taught anything, in the first instance, 
by Carlyle, it was only in proportion as I came to see 
the same truths through media more suited to my 
mental constitution, that I recognised them in his 
writings. Then, indeed, the wonderful power with 
which he put them forth made a deep impression 
upon me, and I was during a long period one of his 
most fervent admirers ; but the good his writings did 
me, was not as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry 
to animate. Even at the time when our acquaintance 
commenced, I was not sufficiently advanced in my 
new modes of thought, to appreciate him fully ; a 
proof of which is, that on his showing me the manu- 
script of Sartor Resartus, his best and greatest work, 
which he had just then finished, I made little of it ; 
though when it came out about two years afterwards 
in Fraser's Magazine I read it with enthusiastic 
admiration and the keenest delight. I did not seek 
and cultivate Carlyle less on account of the funda- 
mental differences in our philosphy. He soon found 
out that I was not " another mystic, " and when for 
the sake of my own integrity I wrote to him a 
distinct profession of all those of my opinions which 
I knew he most disliked, he replied that the chief 
difference between us was that I " was as yet con- 



176 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

sciously nothing of a mystic." I do not know at what 

period he gave up the expectation that I was d- 

to become one ; but though both his and my opini 

underwent in subsequent y 

we never approached much I li oth 

modes of thought than we 

our acquaintance. I did not, however, dn m myself a 

competent judge of Carlyla I felt - a 

p6et, and that I was not; that he 

intuition, which I was not ; and thai 

only saw many things ! me, which i 

only when they were pointed oul to 

and prove, but thai it was highly pr 

see many things which were not visil 

after they werd pointed out I knew thai [< >uld 

not see round him, and could never b I 

saw over him; and I neverpresuo 

with any definiteness, until h< 

by one greatly the superior of us both— who was 

a poet than he, and more a thinker than I — whose <- 

mind and nature included his, and infinitely 

Among the persons of intellect whom I 1 
of old, the one with whom I had 
agreement was the elder Austin- I : 
that he always set himself in i 
sectarianism ; and lat w 
under new influenc Having been 

Professor of Jurisprudence in the London Unii 



OXE STAGE ONWARD. 177 

(now University College), he had lived for some time 
at Bonn to study for his Lectures ; and the influences 
of German literature and of the German character 
and state of society had made a very perceptible 
change in his views of life. His personal disposition 
was much softened ; he was less militant and polemic ; 
his tastes had begun to turn themselves towards the 
poetic and contemplative. He attached much less 
importance than formerly to outward changes ; unless 
accompanied by a better cultivation of the inward 
nature. He had a strong distaste for the general 
meanness of English life, the absence of enlarged 
thoughts and unselfish desires, the low objects on 
which the faculties of all classes of the English are 
intent. Even the kind of public interests which 
Englishmen care for, he held in very little esteem. 
He thought that there was more practical good 
government, and (which is true enough) infinitely 
more care for the education and mental improvement 
of all ranks of the people, under the Prussian 
monarchy, than under the English representative 
government : and he held, with the French Econo- 
mises, that the real security for good government is 
" un peuple eclaire," which is not always the fruit of 
popular institutions, and which if it could be had 
without them, would do their work better than they. 
Though he approved of the Reform Bill, he predicted, 
what in fact occurred, that it would not produce the 

N 



178 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

great immediate improvements in government, which 

many expected from it. The men, he said, who 

could do these great things, did not exist in the 

country. There were many points of b hy 

between him and me, Loth in the new 0] he 

had adopted and in the old ores whi 

Like me, he never an utilit 

with all Lis love of t 

of their literal are, never be 

degree reconciled to the innate-pi ' 

lie cultivated more and m< 

religion, a n ! ad feeli , if 

anything, of pos ii i\ . in J'*- 1 

here it was that I DQ I with 

an indifference, b 

progress of popular institu 

in that of Socialism, as th 

compelling the p< e the j 

and to impress on them the only real m 

manently improving their material 

limitation of their numl 

time, fundamentally opposed to E 

an ultimate result of im] nt. I 

great disrespect for what he called " the uni 

principles of human nature of the j 

and insisted on the evidence which history 

experience afford of the 

human nature" (a phrase which 1 haw 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 179 

borrowed from him) ; nor did he think it possible to 
set any positive bounds to the moral capabilities 
which might unfold themselves in mankind, under an 
enlightened direction of social and educational in- 
fluences. Whether he retained all these opinions to 
the end of life I know not. Certainly the modes oi 
thinking of his later years, and especially of his last 
publication, were much more Tory in their general 
character than those which he held at this time. 

My fathers tone of thought and feeling, I now 
felt myself at a great distance from : greater, indeed, 
than a full and calm explanation and reconsideration 
on both sides, might have shown to exist in reality. 
But my father was not one with whom calm and full 
explanations on fundamental points of doctrine could 
be expected, at least with one whom he might con- 
sider as, in some sort, a deserter from his standard. 
Fortunately we were almost always in strong agree- 
ment on the political questions of the day, which 
engrossed a large part of his interest and of his 
conversation. On those matters of opinion on which 
we differed, we talked little. He knew that the 
habit of thinking for myself, which his mode of 
education had fostered, sometimes led me to opinions 
different from his, and he perceived from time to 
time that I did not always tell him how different. 
I expected no good, but only pain to both of us, from 
discussing our differences : and I never expressed them 

N 2 



180 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 



but when he gave utterance to some opinion or feeling 
repugnant to mine, in a manner which would have 
made it disingenuousness on my part to remain silent. 

It remains to speak of what I wrote during tl 
years, which, independently of my contributi 
newspapers, was considerable. In 1830 and 1831 I 
wrote the five Essays since published under tJ 
of "Essays on some Unsettled Questions of P 
Economy," almost as they now stand, except that 
in 1833 I partially rewrote the fifth Essay T : 
were written wit li no immediate purpose of publica- 
tion; and when, some years later, I ! them 
a publisher, he declined them. They wei 
printed in 1844, after the Buccess of the "S 
Logic." I also resumed my speculations on t 1 
subject, and puzzled myself, like others before i 
with the groat paradox of the discovery of i 
truths by general reasoning. As to the fact, tl 
could be no doubt. As little could it be doubl 
that all reasoning is resolvable into syllogisms, and 
that in every syllogism the conclusion is actually 
contained and implied in the premises. How, 
so contained and implied, it could be new truth, i 
how the theorems of geometry, so different in ap- 
pearance from the definitions and axi< 
all contained in these, was a difficulty which n 
I thought, had sufficiently felt, and which, at 
events, no one had succeeded in clearing up. ] 



ONE STAGE ONWARD. 181 

explanations offered by Whately and others, though 

they might give a temporary satisfaction, always, in 

my mind, left a mist still hanging over the subject. 

At last, when reading a second or third time the 

chapters on Reasoning in the second volume of 

Dugald Stewart, interrogating myself on every 

point, and following out, as far as I knew how, every 

topic of thought which the book suggested, I came 

upon an idea of his respecting the use of axioms in 

ratiocination, which I did not remember to have 

before noticed, but which now, in meditating on it, 

seemed to me not only true of axioms, but of all 

general propositions whatever, and to be the key of 

the whole perplexity. From this germ grew the 

theory of the Syllogism propounded in the Second 

Book of the Logic ; which I immediately fixed by 

writing it out. And now, with greatly increased 

hope of being able to produce a work on Logic, of 

some originality and value, I proceeded to write the 

First Book, from the rough and imperfect draft I had 

already made. What I now wrote became the basis 

of that part of the subsequent Treatise ; except that 

it did not contain the Theory of Kinds, which was a 

later addition, suggested by otherwise inextricable 

difficulties which met me in my first attempt to 

work out the subject of some of the concluding 

chapters of the Third Book. At the point which I 

had now reached I made a halt, which lasted five 



182 ONE STAGE ONWARD. 

years. I had come to the end of my tether ; I could 

make nothing satisfactory of Induction, at this tii 

I continued to read any book which to 

promise light on the subject, and i 

as well as I could, the results; but for a I 

I found nothing which seemed to open to mu any 

very important vein of meditation. 

In 1832 I wrote 
of Tait's Magazine, and one for a quarterly period] 
called the Jurist, which had been founded, and for a 
short time carried on, by a set of friends, all lawy< 
and law reformers, with several of whom I v. 
acquainted The paper in qu 
rights and duties of the State re 
and Church Propei 
collected u Dissertal tana and I >isc 
of my articles in "Taii/ 1 "The Curre le," 

also appears. In the whole mac what I wrote 

previous to these, there b nothing of 
permanent value to justify reprinting. Th in 

the Jurist, which I still think a wry i 
cussion of the rights of the State o\ 
showed both sides of my opinions, 
as [ should have done at any time, tl 
all endowments are national property, which I 
government may and ought to control ; bui - 1 

should once have done, condemning endowments in 
themselves, and proposing that they should 



ONE STAGE ONWAKD. 183 

taken to pay oi?the national debt. On the contrary, 
I urged strenuously the importance of having a 
provision for education, not dependent on the mere 
demand of the market, that is, on the knowledge 
and discernment of average parents, but calculated 
to establish and keep up a higher standard of 
instruction than is likely to be spontaneously 
demanded by the buyers of the article. All these 
opinions have been confirmed and strengthened by 
the whole course of my subsequent reflections. 



CHAPTER VL 



COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP 
OF MY LIFE. MY FATHER'S DEATH. WBJTDt 
AND OTHER PROCEEDINGS UP 10 1840. 

IT was at the period of my mental pr which I 

have now reached thai I formed the I (hip 

which has been the honour and chief bl my 

existence, as well as the source of a great part of all 
that I have attempted to do, or ho] here- 

after, for human improvement. My first introduction 
to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty 
consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I 
was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third 
year. With her husband's family it was the renewal 
of an old acquaintanceship. His grandfather lived 
in the next house to my father's in Newington 
Green, and I had, sometimes when a hoy, b 
invited to play in the old gentleman's garden. He 
was a fine specimen of the old Scotch Turn rn, 

severe, and powerful, but very kind to childn 
whom such men make a lasting impression. Al- 
though it was years after my introduction 
Taylor before my acquaintance with her becai 



THE MOST VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 185 

all intimate or confidential, I very soon felt her to be 
the most admirable person I had ever known. It is 
not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at 
the age at which I first saw her, could be, all that 
she afterwards became. Least of all could this be true 
of her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the 
highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature ; 
a necessity equally from the ardour with which she 
sought it, and from the spontaneous tendency of 
faculties which could not receive an impression or an 
experience without making it the source or the 
occasion of an accession of wisdom. Up to the time 
when I first saw her, her rich and powerful nature 
had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received 
type of feminine genius. To her outer circle she was 
a beauty and a wit, with an air of natural distinction, 
felt by all who approached her : to the inner, a 
woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and 
intuitive intelligence, and of an eminently meditative 
and poetic nature. Married at an early age, to a 
most upright, brave, and honourable man, of liberal 
oj:>inions and good education, but without the 
intellectual or artistic tastes which would have 
made him a companion for her, though a steady and 
affectionate friend, for whom she had true esteem 
and the strongest affection through life, and whom 
she most deeply lamented when dead ; shut out by 
the social disabilities of women from any adequate 



18G COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST " 

exercise of her highest faculties in action on the 
world without ; her life was one of inward me 
tion, varied by familiar intercourse with a small 
circle of friends, of whom one only (long sine 
ceased) was a person of l or of i a of 

feeling or intellect kindred with her own, but all 
had more or less of alliance with her in sentimei 
and opinions. Into this i 1 had the good f 

tune to be admitted, and 1 soon perceived that she 
possessed in combination, the qualities which in all 
other persons'whom I had known I had been oi 
too happy to find singly. In her, com] 
pation from every kind of tition | 

that which attributes a pretended perfection to the 
order of nature and the universe)! and an ean 
protest against many things which i 
the established constitution i resulted not 

from the hard intellect, but from strength of noble 
and elevated feeling, and co-existed with a highly 
reverential nature. In general spiritual o 
teristicSj as well as in temperament and oiganL 
I have often compared her, as she was at this til 
to Shelley: but in thought and intellect, Shelley, 
far as his powers were developed in I 
was but a child compared with what she uhr 
became. Alike in the highest « 
and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, I 
mind was the same perfect instrument, p. 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 187 

the very heart and marrow of the matter; always 
seizing the essential idea or principle. The same 
exactness and raj)idity of operation, pervading as it 
did her sensitive as well as her mental faculties, 
would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have 
fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery 
and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would 
certainly have made her a great orator, and her pro- 
found knowledge of human nature and discernment 
and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times 
when such a carriere was open to women, have made 
her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her in- 
tellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character 
at once the noblest and the best balanced which I 
have e\ er met with in life. Her unselfishness was 
not that of "a taught system of duties, but of a heart 
which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of 
others, and often went to excess in consideration for 
them by imaginatively investing their feelings with 
the intensity of its own. The passion of justice 
might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, 
but for her boundless generosity, and a lovingness 
ever ready to pour itself forth upon any or all 
human beings who were capable of giving the 
smallest feeling in return. The rest of her moral 
characteristics were such as naturally accompany 
these qualities of mind and heart : the most 
genuine modesty combined with the loftiest pride ; 



188 COM^IEXCEMEXT OF THE MOST S 

a simplicity and sincerity which were absolute, 
towards all who were fit to receive tliem ; the 
utmost scorn of whatever was mean and c y, 

and a burning indignation at everythi car 

tyrannical, faithless or dishonourable in conduc 
character, while mnlring the broadest distinction 
between mala in se and mere fii — ■ 

between acts giving evidence of intrinsic b in 

feeling and character, and those whi 
violations of conventions either good or 1 la- 

tions which whether in themseh hi orwroi 

are capable of being committed by | 3 in every 

otlier respect loveable or admirab] 

To be admitted into a of mental b 

course with a being of th< 

have a most beneficial influence on pay development ; 
though the effect was only gradual, and m 
elapsed before her mental pi and mine w< 

forward in the complete companionship th 

attained. The benefit I iveei\ 

any which I could hope to give; th • her, who 

had at first reached her opinions by the m< ral intui- 
tion of a character o( strong feeling, I 
doubtless help as well ; 

derived from one who bad arrived at : : lie 

same results by study and reasoning: and in 
rapidity of her intellectual growth, hi 1 

activity, which converted everything 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 189 

doubtless drew from me, as it did from other sources, 
many of its materials. What I owe, even intel- 
lectually, to her, is in its detail, almost infinite ; of 
its general character a few words will give some, 
though a very imperfect, idea. 

With those who, like all the best and wisest of 
mankind, are dissatisfied with human life as it is, and 
whose feelings are wholly identified with its radical 
amendment, there are two main regions of thought. 
One is the region of ultimate aims ; the constituent 
elements of the highest realizable ideal of human life. 
The other is that of the immediately useful and prac- 
tically attainable. In both these departments, I have 
acquired more from her teaching, than from all other 
sources taken together. And, to say truth, it is in these 
two extremes principally, that real certainty lies. My 
own strength lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery 
intermediate region, that of theory, or moral and poli- 
tical science : respecting the conclusions of which, in 
any of the forms in which I have received or originated 
them, whether as political economy, analytic psy- 
chology, logic, philosophy of history, or anything else, 
it is not the least of my intellectual obligations to 
her that I have derived from her a wise scepticism, 
which, while it has not hindered me from following 
out the honest exercise of my thinking faculties to 
whatever conclusions might result from it, has put 
me on my guard against holding or announcing these 



190 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST' 

conclusions with a degree of confidence which, the 
nature of such speculations does not warrant, and has 
kept my mind not only open to admit, but prompt to 
welcome and eager to seek, even on the questions on 
which I have most meditated, any prospect of clearer 
perceptions and better evidence. I have often 
received praise, which in my own right I only 
partially deserve, for the greater practicality which 
is supposed to be found in my writings, compared 
with those of most thinkers who have been equally 
addicted to large generalizations. The writings in 
which this quality has been observed, were not the 
work of one mind, but of the fusion of two, one of 
them as pre-eminently practical in its judgments and 
perceptions of things present, as it was high and 
bold in its anticipations for a remote futurity. 

At the present period, however, this influence a 
only one among many which were helping to shape 
the character of my future development : and even 
after it became, I may truly say, the presid: 
principle of my mental pr it did not alter the 

path, but only made me move forward more boldly, 
and, at the same time, more cautiously, in the same 
course. The only actual revolution which has ever 
taken place in my modes of thinking, was already 
complete. My new tendencies had to be i d 

in some respects, moderated in others : but tin 
substantial changes of opinion that wt 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 191 

related to politics, and consisted, on one hand, in a 
greater approximation, so far as regards the ultimate 
prospects of humanity, to a qualified Socialism, and 
on the other, a shifting of my political ideal from 
pure democracy, as commonly understood by its 
partizans, to the modified form of it, which is set 
forth in my " Considerations on Representative 
Government." 

This last change, which took place very gradually, 
dates its commencement from my reading, or rather 
study, of M. de Tocqueville's " Democracy in America/' 
which fell into my hands immediately after its first 
appearance. In that remarkable work, the excel- 
lences of democracy were pointed out in a more 
conclusive, because a more specific manner than I 
had ever known them to be, even by the most 
enthusiastic democrats ; while the specific dangers 
which beset democracy, considered as the govern- 
ment of the numerical majority, were brought into 
equally strong light, and subjected to a masterly 
analysis, not as reasons for resisting what the author 
considered as an inevitable result of human progress, 
but as indications of the weak points of popular 
government, the defences by which it needs to be 
guarded, and the correctives which must be added 
to it in order that while full play is given to its 
beneficial tendencies, those which are of a different 
nature may be neutralized or mitigated. I was now 



192 



COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST; 



well prepared for speculations of this character, and 
from this time onward my own thought* .»re 

and more in the same channel, though the oonsequi 
modifications in my p 1 political creed m 

spread over many . as would he shown by 

comparing my fir- riew of u Dem< in 

America," written and published in 1835, with the 
one in 1840 (reprinted in the "Dissertati 
this last, with tl. lerations on Repn 

Government/ 1 

A collateral Bubject on which also I 
benefit from the study of T ille, was the 

fundamental question i I werfiil 

philosophic analysis which he applied 
and to French i . led him to attach * 

utmost importance to the perforn 
the collective business of - so 

performed, by the people themseh 
intervention of the executive government, eitl 
supersede their agency, or to dictate tl. 
its exercise. He viewed this practical politic 
activity o( the individual citi 
the most effectual means 
feelings and practical intelligence of the | 
important in themselves and so ; 
good government, but 
active to some of the 
democracy, and a nea its 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 193 

degenerating into the only despotism of which, in the 
modern world, there is real danger — the absolute rule 
of the head of the executive over a congregation of 
isolated individuals, all equals but all slaves. There 
was, indeed, no immediate peril from this source on 
the British side of the channel, where nine-tenths of 
the internal business which elsewhere devolves on 
the government, was transacted by agencies inde- 
pendent of it ; where centralization was, and is, the 
subject not only of rational disapprobation, but of 
unreasoning prejudice ; where jealousy of government 
interference was a blind feeling preventing or re- 
sisting even the most beneficial exertion of legislative 
authority to correct the abuses of what pretends to 
be local self-government, but is, too often, selfish 
mismanagement of local interests, by a jobbing and 
borne local oligarchy. But the more certain the public 
were to go wrong on the side opposed to centraliza- 
tion, the greater danger was there lest philosophic 
reformers should fall into the contrary error, and 
overlook the mischiefs of which they had been spared 
the painful experience. I was myself, at this very 
time, actively engaged in defending important 
measures, such as the great Poor Law Reform of 
1834, against an irrational clamour grounded on the 
anti-centralization prejudice : and had it not been 
for the lessons of Toequeville, I do not know that I 
might not, like many reformers before .me, have been 

o 



ID 4 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

hurried into the excess opposite to that, which, being 
the one prevalent in my own country, it was generally 
in v business to combat. As it is, I have steered care- 
fully between the two errors, and whether I have or 
have not drawn the line between them exactly in the 
right place, I have at least insisted with equal em- 
phasis upon the evils on both sides, and have made 
the means of reconciling the advantages of both, a 
subject of serious study. 

In the meanwhile had taken place the election of 
the first Reformed Parliament, which included several 
of the most notable of my Radical friends and 
acquaintances — Grote, Roebuck, Buller, Sir William 
Molesw r orth, John and Edward Romilly, and several 
more ; besides Warburton, Strutt, and others, who 
were in Parliament already. Those who thought 
themselves, and were called by their friends, the 
philosophic Radicals, had now, it seemed, a fair 
opportunity, in a more advantageous position than 
they had ever before occupied, for showing what was 
in them ; and I, as well as my father, founded great 
hopes on them. These hopes were destined to be 
disappointed. The men were honest, and faithful to 
their opinions, as far as votes were concerned ; often 
in spite of much discouragement. When measures 
were proposed, flagrantly at variance with their 
principles, su'ch as the Irish Coercion Bill, or the 
Canada Coercion in 1837, they came forward manfully, 



; 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 195 

and braved any amount of hostility and prejudice 
rather than desert the right. But on the whole 
they did very little to promote any opinions ; they 
had little enterprise, little activity : they left the lead 
of the Radical portion of the House to the old hands, 
to Hume and O'Connell. A partial exception must 
be made in favour of one or two of the younger men ; 
and in the case of Roebuck, it is his title to per- 
manent remembrance, that in the very first year 
during which he sat in Parliament, he originated (or 
re- originated after the unsuccessful attempt of 
Mr. Brougham) the parliamentary movement for 
National Education ; and that he was the first to 
commence, and for years carried on almost alone, the 
contest for the self-government of the Colonies. 
Nothing, on the whole equal to these two things, 
was done by any other individual, even of those from 
whom most w T as expected. And now, on a calm 
retrospect, I can perceive that the men were less in 
fault than we supposed, and that we had expected 
too much from them. They were in unfavourable 
circumstances. Their lot was cast in the ten years 
of inevitable reaction, when, the Reform excitement 
being over, and the few legislative improvements 
which the public really called for having been rapidly 
effected, power gravitated back in its natural 
direction, to those who were for keeping things as 
they were ; when the public mind desired rest, and 

o 2 



196 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

was less disposed than at any other period since the 
peace, to let itself be moved by attempts to work up 
the Reform feeling into fresh activity in favour of new 
things. It would have required a great political 
leader, which no one is to be blamed for not being, 
to have effected really great things by parliamentary 
discussion when the nation was in this mood. My 
father and I had hoped that some competent leader 
might arise ; some man of philosophic attainments 
and popular talents, who could have put heart into the 
many younger or less distinguished men that would 
have been ready to join him — could have made them 
available, to the extent of their talents, in bringing 
advanced ideas before the public — could have used 
the House of Commons as a rostra or a teacher's 
chair for instructing and impelling the public mind ; 
and would either have forced the Whigs to receive 
their measures from him, or have taken the lead of 
the Reform party out of their hands. Such a leader 
there would have been, if my father had been in 
Parliament. For want of such a man 5 the instructed 
Radicals sank into a mere Cote Gauche of the Whig 
party. With a keen, and as I now think, an exag- 
gerated sense of the possibilities which were open to 
the Radicals if they made even ordinary exertion for 
I their opinions, I laboured from this time till 1839, both 
by personal influence with some of them, and by 
writings, to put ideas into their heads, and purpose 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OP MY LIFE. 197 

into their hearts. I did some good with Charles 
Buller, and some with Sir William Molesworth ; both 
of whom did valuable service, but were unhappily 
cut off almost in the beginning of their usefulness. 
On the whole, however, my attempt was vain. To 
have had a chance of succeeding in it, required a 
different position from mine. It was a task only for 
one who, being himself in Parliament, could have 
mixed with the Radical members in daily consulta- 
tion, could himself have taken the initiative, and 
instead of urging others to lead, could have summoned 
them to follow. 

What I could do by writing, I did. During the 
year 1833 I continued working in the Examiner with 
Fonblanque, who at that time was zealous in keeping 
up the fight for Radicalism against the Whig ministry. 
During the session of 1834 I wrote comments on 
passing events, of the nature of newspaper articles 
(under the title of " Notes on the Newspapers"), in 
| the Monthly Repository, a magazine conducted by 
Mr. Fox, well known as a preacher and political 
I orator, and subsequently as member of Parliament 
: for Oldham ; with whom I had lately become ac- 
l quainted, and for whose sake chiefly I wrote in his 
I magazine. I contributed several other articles to 
this periodical, the most considerable of which (on 
i the theory of Poetry), is reprinted in the " Disserta- 
tions." Altogether, the writings (independently of 



193 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

those in newspapers) which I published-from 1832 to 
1834, amount to a large volume. This, however, 
includes abstracts of several of Plato's Dialogues, 
with introductory remarks, which, though not jmb- 
lished until 1834, had been written several years 
earlier ; and which I afterwards, on various occasions, 
found to have been read, and their authorship known, 
by more people than were aware of anything else 
which I had written, up to that time. To complete 
the tale of my writings at this period, I may add 
that in 1833, at the request of Bulwer, who was just 
then completing his " England and the English' ' (a 
work, at that time, greatly in advance of the public 
mind), I wrote for him a critical account of Bentham's 
philosophy, a small part of which he incorporated in 
his text, and printed the rest (with an honourable 
acknowledgment), as an appendix. In this, along 
with the favourable, a part also of the unfavourable 
side of my estimation of Bentham's doctrines, con- 
sidered as a complete philosophy, was for the first 
time put into print. 

But an opportunity soon offered, by which, as it 
seemed, I might have it in my power to give 
more effectual aid, and, at the same time, stimulus, 
to the " philosophic Radical" party, than I had 
done hitherto. One of the projects occasionally 
talked of between my father and me, and some 
of the parliamentary and other Radicals who 
frequented his house, was the foundation of a 



■ 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 199 

periodical organ of philosophic radicalism, to take 
the place which the Westminster Review had been 
intended to fill : and the scheme had gone so far as 
to bring under discussion the pecuniary contributions 
which could be looked for, and the choice of an 
editor. Nothing, however, came of it for some time : 
but in the summer of 1834 Sir William Molesworth, 
himself a laborious student, and a precise and meta- 
physical thinker, capable of aiding the cause by his 
pen as well as by his purse, spontaneously proposed 
to establish a Review, provided I would consent to 
be the real, if I could not be the ostensible, editor. 
Such a proposal was not to be refused ; and the 
Review was founded, at first under the title of the 
London Review, and afterwards under that of 
the London and Westminster, Molesworth having 
bought the Westminster from its proprietor, General 
Thompson, and merged the two into one. In the 
years between 1834 and 1840 the conduct of this 
Review occupied the greater part of my spare time. 
In the beginning, it did not, as a whole, by any 
means represent my opinions. I was under the 
necessity of conceding much to my inevitable asso- 
ciates. The Review was established to be the repre- 
sentative of the " philosophic Radicals," with most 
of whom I was now at issue on many essential points, 
and among whom I could not even claim to be the 
most important individual. My father s co-operation 
as a writer we all deemed indispensable, and he wrote 



200 COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST 

largely in it until prevented by his la£fc illness. 
The subjects of his articles, and the strength and 
decision with which his opinions were expressed in 
them, made the Review at first derive its tone and 
colouring from him much more than from any 
of the other writers. I could not exercise editorial 
control over his articles, and I was sometimes obliged 
to sacrifice to him portions of my own. The old 
Westminster Review doctrines, but little modified, 
thus formed the staple of the Review ; but I hoped, 
by the side of these, to introduce other ideas 
and another tone, and to obtain for my own shade of 
opinion a fair representation, along with those of 
other members of the party. With this end chiefly 
in view, I made it one of the peculiarities of the 
work that every article should bear an initial, or some 
other signature, and be held to express the opinions 
solely of the individual writer ; the editor being only 
responsible for its being worth publishing, and not in 
conflict with the objects for which the Review was set 
on foot. I had an opportunity of putting in practice 
my scheme of conciliation between the old and the 
new " philosophic radicalism," by the choice of a sub- 
ject for my own first contribution. Professor Sedg- 
wick, a man of eminence in a particular walk of 
natural science, but who should not have trespassed 
into philosophy, had lately published his Discourse 
on the Studies of Cambridge, which had as its most 



VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. 201 

prominent feature an intemperate assault on analytic 
psychology and utilitarian ethics, in the form of an 
attack on Locke and Paley. This had excited great 
indignation in my father and others, which I thought 
it fully deserved. And here, I imagined, was an 
opportunity of at the same time repelling an unjust 
attack, and inserting into my defence of Hartleianism 
and Utilitarianism a number of the opinions which 
constituted my view of those subjects, as distinguished 
from that of my old associates. In this I partially 
succeeded, though my relation to my father would 
have made it painful to me in any case, and impos- 
sible in a Review for which he wrote, to speak out 
my whole mind on the subject at this time. 

I am, however, inclined to think that my father 
was not so much opposed as he seemed, to the modes 
of thought in which I believed myself to differ from 
him ; that he did injustice to his own opinions by 
the unconscious exaggerations of an intellect em- 
phatically polemical ; and that when thinking with- 
out an adversary in view, he was willing to make 
room for a great portion of the truths he seemed to 
deny. I have frequently observed that he made 
large allowance in practice for considerations which 
seemed to have no place in his theory. His " Frag- 
ment on Mackintosh," which he wrote and published 
about this time, although I greatly admired some 
parts of it, I read as a whole with more pain than 



202 My father's deatA. 

pleasure ; yet on reading it again, long after, I found 
little in the opinions it contains, but what I think in 
the main just ; and I can even sympathize in his 
disgust at the verbiage of Mackintosh, though his 
asperity towards it went not only beyond what was 
judicious, but beyond what was even fair. One 
thing, which I thought, at the time, of good augury, 
was the very favourable reception he gave to 
Tocquevilles "Democracy in America." It is true, 
he said and thought much more about what Tocque- 
ville said in favour of democracy, than about what 
he said of its disadvantages. Still, his high appre- 
ciation of a book which was at any rate an example 
of a mode of treating the question of government 
almost the reverse of his — wholly inductive and 
analytical, instead of purely ratiocinative — gave me 
great encouragement. He also approved of an article 
which I published in the first number following the 
junction of the two reviews, the essay reprinted in 
the " Dissertations," under the title " Civilization ;" 
into which I threw many of my new opinions, and 
criticised rather emphatically the mental and moral 
tendencies of the time, on grounds and in a manner 
which I certainly had not learnt from him. 

All speculation, however, on the possible future 
developments of my father's opinions, and on the 
probabilities of permanent co-operation between him 
and me in the promulgation of our thoughts, was 



my father's death. 203 

doomed to be cut short. During the whole of 1835 
his health had been declining : his symptoms became 
unequivocally those of pulmonary consumption, and 
after lingering to the last stage of debility, he died 
on the 23rd of June, 1836. Until the last few days 
of his life there was no apparent abatement of intel- 
lectual vigour ; his interest in all things and persons 
that had interested him through life was un- 
diminished, nor did the approach of death cause 
the smallest wavering (as in so strong and firm a 
mind it was impossible that it should) in his con- 
victions on the subject of religion. His principal 
satisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, 
seemed to be the thought of what he had done to 
make the world better than he found it ; and his 
chief regret in not living longer, that he had not had 
time to do more. 

His place is an eminent one in the literary, and 
even in the political history of his country ; and it 
is far from honourable to the generation which has 
benefited by his worth, that he is so seldom men- 
tioned, and, compared with men far his inferiors, 
so little remembered. This is probably to be ascribed 
mainly to two causes. In the first place, the thought 
of him merges too much in the deservedly superior 
fame of Bentham. Yet he was anything but Ben- 
tham s mere follower or disciple. Precisely because 
he was himself one of the most original thinkers of 



204 my father's death. 

his time, he was one of the earliest to appreciate and 
adopt the most important mass of original thought 
which had been produced by the generation pre- 
ceding him. His mind and Bentham's were essen- 
tially of different construction. He had not all 
Bentham's high qualities, but neither had Bentham 
all his. It would, indeed, be ridiculous to claim for 
him the praise of having accomplished for mankind 
such splendid services as Bentham's. He did not 
revolutionize, or rather create, one of the great 
departments of human thought. But, leaving out 
of the reckoning all that portion of his labours in 
which he benefited by what Bentham had done, and 
counting only what he achieved in a province in 
which Bentham had done nothing, that of analytic 
psychology, he will be known to posterity as one of 
the greatest names in that most important branch 
of speculation, on which all the moral and political 
sciences ultimately rest, and will mark one of the 
essential stages in its progress. The other reason 
which has made his fame less than he deserved, 
is that notwithstanding the great number of his 
opinions which, partly through his own efforts, have 
now been generally adopted, there was, on the 
whole, a marked opposition between his spirit and 
that of the present time. As Brutus was called the 
last of the Romans, so was he the last of the 
eighteenth century : he continued its tone of 



MY FATHERS DEATH. 205 

thought and sentiment into the nineteenth (though 
not unmodified nor unimproved), partaking neither 
in the good nor in the bad influences of the reaction 
against the eighteenth century, which was the great 
characteristic of the first half of the nineteenth. 
The eighteenth century was a great age, an age of 
strong and brave men, and he was a fit companion 
for its strongest and bravest. By his writings and 
his personal influence he was a great centre of light 
to his generation. During his later years he was 
quite as much the head and leader of the intellec- 
tual radicals in England, as Voltaire was of the 
pldlosophes of France. It is only one of his minor 
merits, that he was the originator of all sound states- 
manship in regard to the subject of his largest 
work, India. lie wrote on no subject which he did 
not enrich with valuable thought, and excepting 
the " Elements of Political Economy," a very useful 
book when first written, but which has now for 
some time finished its work, it will be long before 
any of his books will be wholly superseded, or will 
cease to be instructive reading to students of their 
subjects. In the power of influencing by mere force 
of mind and character, the convictions and purposes 
of others, and in the strenuous exertion of that 
power to promote freedom and progress, he left, as 
my knowledge extends, no equal among men, and 
but one among women. 



206 WRITINGS AND OTHER 

Though acutely sensible of my own inferiority in 
the qualities by which he acquired his persona] 
ascendancy, I had now to try what it might be pos- 
sible for me to accomplish without him : and the 
Review was the instrument on which I built my 
chief hopes of establishing a useful influence over 
the liberal and democratic section of the public 
mind. Deprived of my father's aid, I was also 
exempted from the restraints and reticences by 
which that aid had been purchased. I did not feel 
that there was any other radical writer or politician 
to whom I was bound to defer, further than con- 
sisted with my own opinions : and having the com- 
plete confidence of Molesworth, I resolved henceforth 
to give full scope to my own opinions and modes of 
thought, and to open the Heview widely to all writer* 
who were in sympathy with Progress as I understood 
it, even though I should lose by it the support of 
my former associates. Carlyle, consequently, became 
from this time a frequent writer in the Review J 
Sterling, soon after, an occasional one ; and though 
each individual article continued to be the expression 
of the private sentiments of its writer, the general 
tone conformed in some tolerable degree to my 
opinions. For the conduct of the Review, under, 
and in conjunction with me, I associated with myself 
a young Scotchman of the name of Robertson, who 
had some ability and information, much industry, 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 207 

and an active scheming head, full of devices for 
making the Review more saleable, and on whose 
capacities in that direction I founded a good deal of 
hope : insomuch, that when Molesworth, in the 
beginning of 1837, became tired of carrying on the 
Review at a loss, and desirous of getting rid of it 
(he had done his part honourably, and at no small 
pecuniary cost,) I, very imprudently for my own 
pecuniary interest, and very much from reliance on 
Robertsons devices, determined to continue it at my 
own risk, until his plans should have had a fair trial. 
The devices were good, and I never had any reason 
to change my opinion of them. But I do not believe 
that any devices would have made a radical and 
democratic review defray its expenses, including a 
paid editor or sub-editor, and a liberal payment to 
writers. I myself and several frequent contributors 
gave our labour gratuitously, as we had done for 
Molesworth ; but the paid contributors continued to 
be remunerated on the usual scale of the Edinburgh 
and Quarterly Reviews ; and this could not be done 
from the proceeds of the sale. 

In the same year, 1837, and in the midst of these 
occupations, I resumed the Logic. I had not touched 
my pen on the subject for five years, having been 
stopped and brought to a halt on the threshold of 
Induction. I had gradually discovered that what- 
was mainly wanting, to overcome the difficulties of 



208 WHITINGS AND OTHEH 

that branch of the subject, was a comprehensive, 
and, at the same time, accurate view of the whole 
circle of physical science, which I feared it would 
take me a long course of study to acquire ; since I 
knew not of any book, or other guide, that would 
spread out before me the generalities and processes 
of the sciences, and I apprehended that I should have 
no choice but to extract them for myself, as I best 
could, from the details. Happily for me, Dr. Whewell, 
early in this year, published his History of the 
Inductive Sciences. I read it with eagerness, and 
found in it a considerable approximation to what I 
wanted. Much, if not most, of the philosophy of the 
work appeared open to objection ; but the materials 
were there, for my own thoughts to work upon : and 
the author had given to those materials that first 
degree of elaboration, which so greatly facilitates and 
abridges the subsequent labour. I had now obtained 
what I had been waiting for. Under the impulse 
given me by the thoughts excited by Dr. Whewell, 
I read again Sir J. Herschel's discourse on the 
Study of Natural Philosophy : and I was able 
to measure the progress my mind had made, by the 
great help I now found in this work — though I had 
read and even reviewed it several years before with 
little profit. I now set myself vigorously to work 
out the subject in thought and in "writing. The 
time I bestowed on this had to be stolen from occu- 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 209 

pations more urgent. I had just two months to 
spare, at this period, in the intervals of writing for 
the Review. In these two months I completed the 
first draft of about a third, the most difficult third, of 
the book. What I had before written, I estimate at 
another third, so that only one-third remained, 
What I wrote at this time consisted of the remainder 
of the doctrine of Reasoning (the theory of Trains 
of Reasoning, and Demonstrative Science), and the 
greater part of the Book on Induction. When this 
was done, I had, as it seemed to me, untied all the 
really hard knots, and the completion of the book 
had become only a question of time. Having got 
thus far, I had to leave off in order to write two 
articles for the next number of the Review. When 
these were written, I returned to the subject, and 
now for the first time fell in with Comte's Cour de 
Philosophic Positive, or rather with the two volumes 
of it which were all that had at that time been 
published. 

My theory of Induction was substantially com- 
pleted before I knew of Comte's book ; and it is 
perhaps well that I came to it by a different road 
from his, since the consequence has been that my 
treatise contains, what his certainly does not, a 
reduction of the inductive process to strict rules and 
to a scientific test, such as the syllogism is for ratio- 
cination. Comte is always precise and profound on 

p 



210 WRITINGS AND OTHER 

the method of investigation, but he does * not even 
attempt any exact definition of the conditions of 
proof: and his writings show that he never attained 
a just conception of them. This, however, was 
specifically the problem which, in treating of Induc- 
tion, I had proposed to myself. Nevertheless, I 
gained much from Comte, with which to enrich my 
chapters in the subsequent rewriting : and his book 
was of essential service to me in some of the parts 
which still remained to be thought out. As his sub- 
sequent volumes successively made their appearance, 
I read them with avidity, but, when he reached the 
subject of Social Science, with varying feelings. 
The fourth volume disappointed me : it contained 
those of his opinions on social subjects with which I 
most disagree. But the fifth, containing the con- 
nected view of history, rekindled all my enthusiasm ; 
which the sixth (or concluding) volume did not mate- 
rially abate. In a merely logical point of view, the 
only leading conception for which I am indebted to 
him is that of the Inverse Deductive Method, as the 
one chiefly applicable to the complicated subjects of 
History and Statistics : a process differing from the 
more common form of the deductive method in 
this — that instead of arriving at its conclusions by 
general reasoning, and verifying them by specific 
experience (as is the natural order in the deductive 
branches of physical science), it obtains its generali- 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 211 

zations by a collation of specific experience, and 
verifies them by ascertaining whether they are such 
as would follow from known general principles. 
This was an idea entirely new to me when I found 
it in Comte : and but for him I might not soon (if 
ever) have arrived at it. 

I had been long an ardent admirer of Comtes 
writings before I had any communication with him- 
self; nor did I ever, to the last, see him in the body. 
But for some years we were frequent correspondents, 
until our correspondence became controversial, and 
our zeal cooled. I was the first to slacken corre- 
spondence ; he was the first to drop it. I found, and 
he probably found likewise, that I could do no good 
to his mind, and that all the good he could do to 
mine, he did by his books. This would never have 
led to discontinuance of intercourse, if the differences 
between us had been on matters of simple doctiine. 
But they were chiefly on those points of opinion 
which blended in both of us with our strongest 
feelings, and determined the entire direction of our 
aspirations. I had fully agreed with him when he 
maintained that the mass of mankind, including 
even their rulers in all the practical departments of 
life, must, from the necessity of the case, accept most 
of their opinions on political and social matters, as 
they do on physical, from the authority of those who 
have bestowed more study on those subjects than 

P 2 



212 WRITINGS AND OTHER 

they generally have it in their power £o do. This 
lesson had been strongly impressed on me by the 
early work of Comte, to which I have adverted. 
And there was nothing in his great Treatise which I 
admired more than his remarkable exposition of the 
benefits which the nations of modern Europe have 
historically derived from the separation, during the 
Middle Ages, of temporal and spiritual power, and 
the distinct organization of the latter. I agreed 
with him that the moral and intellectual ascendancy, 
once exercised by priests, must in time pass into the 
hands of philosophers, and will naturally do so when 
they become sufficiently unanimous, and in other 
respects worthy to possess it. But when he exagge- 
rated this line of thought into a practical system, in 
which philosophers were to be organized into a kind 
of corporate hierarchy, invested with almost the same 
spiritual supremacy (though without any secular 
power) once possessed by the Catholic Church ; when 
I found him relying on this spiritual authority as the 
only security for good government, the sole bulwark 
against practical oppression, and expecting that by 
it a system of despotism in the state and despotism 
in the family would be rendered innocuous and bene- 
ficial ; it is not surprising, that while as logicians we 
were nearly at one, as sociologists we could travel 
together no further. M. Comte lived to cany out 
these doctrines to their extremest consequences, by 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 213 

planning, in his last work, the " Systeme de Politique 
Positive," the completest system of spiritual and 
temporal despotism which ever yet emanated from a 
human brain, unless possibly that of Ignatius Loyola : 
a system by winch the yoke of general opinion, 
wielded by an organized body of spiritual teachers 
and rulers, would be made supreme over every action, 
and as far as is in human possibility, every thought, 
of every member of the community, as well in the 
things which regard only himself, as in those which 
concern the interests of others. It is but just to 
say that this work is a considerable improvement, in 
many points of feeling, over Comte's previous 
writings on the same subjects : but as an accession 
to social philosophy, the only value it seems to me 
to possess, consists in putting an end to the notion 
that no effectual moral authority can be maintained 
over society without the aid of religious belief; 
for Comte's work recognises no religion except that 
of Humanity, yet it leaves an irresistible convic- 
tion that any moral beliefs concurred in by the 
community generally, may be brought to bear upon 
the whole conduct and lives of its individual 
members, with an energy and potency truly alarm- 
ing to think of. The book stands a monumental 
warning to thinkers on society and politics, of what 
happens when once men lose sight in their specula- 
tions, of the value of Liberty and of Individuality. 



214 WRITINGS AND OTHER 

To return to myself. The Review engrossed, for 
some time longer, nearly all the time I could devote 
to authorship, or to thinking with authorship in 
view. The articles from the London and Westmin- 
ster Review which are reprinted in the " Disserta- 
tions," are scarcely a fourth part of those I wrote. 
In the conduct of the Review I had two principal 
objects. One was to free philosophic radicalism from 
the reproach of sectarian Benthamism. I desired, 
while retaining the precision of expression, the 
definiteness of meaning, the contempt of declama- 
tory phrases and vague generalities, which were so 
honourably characteristic both of Bentham and of my 
father, to give a wider basis and a more free and 
genial character to Radical speculations ; to show 
that there was a Radical philosophy, better and more 
complete than Bentham's, while recognising and in- 
corporating all of Bentham's which is permanently 
valuable. In this first object I, to a certain extent, 
succeeded. The other thing I attempted, was to 
stir up the educated Radicals, in and out of Par- 
liament, to exertion, and induce them to make them- 
selves, what I thought by using the proper means 
they might become — a powerful party capable of 
taking the government of the country, or at least of 
dictating the terms on which they should share it 
with the Whigs. This attempt was from the first 
chimerical : partly because the time was unpropitious, 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 215 

the Reform fervour being in its period of ebb, and 
the Tory influences powerfully rallying ; but still 
more, because, as Austin so truly said, "the country 
did not contain the men." Among the Radicals in 
Parliament there were several qualified to be useful 
members of an enlightened Radical party, but none 
capable of forming and leading such a party. The 
exhortations I addressed to them found no response. 
One occasion did present itself when there seemed 
to be room for a bold and successful stroke for 
Radicalism. Lord Durham had left the Ministry, 
by reason, as was thought, of their not being suffi- 
ciently Liberal ; he afterwards accepted from them 
the task of ascertaining and removing the causes of 
the Canadian rebellion ; he had shown a disposition 
to surround himself at the outset with Radical 
advisers ; one of his earliest measures, a good 
measure both in intention and in effect, having been 
disapproved and reversed by the Government at 
home, he had resigned his post, and placed himself 
openly in a position of quarrel with the Ministers. 
Here was a possible chief for a Radical party in the 
person of a man of importance, who was hated by 
the Tories and had just been injured by the Whigs. 
Any one who had the most elementary notions of 
party tactics, must have attempted to make some- 
thing of such an opportunity. Lord Durham was 
bitterly attacked from all sides, inveighed against by 



216 WRITINGS AND OTHER 

enemies, given up by timid friends ; while those who 
would willingly have defended him did not know 
what to say. He appeared to be returning a de- 
feated and discredited man. I had followed the 
Canadian events from the beginning; I had been 
one of the prompters of his prompters ; his policy 
was almost exactly what mine would have been, 
and I was in a position to defend it. I wrote and 
published a manifesto in the Review, in which I took 
the very highest ground in his behalf, claiming for 
him not mere acquittal, but praise and honour. In- 
stantly a number of other writers took up the tone : 
I believe there was a portion of truth in what Lord 
Durham, soon after, with polite exaggeration, said to 
me — that to this article might be ascribed the 
almost triumphal reception which he met with on 
his arrival in England. I believe it to have been 
the word in season, which, at a critical moment, 
does much to decide the result ; the touch which 
determines whether a stone, set in motion at the top 
of an eminence, shall roll down on one side or on the j 
other. All hopes connected with Lord Durham as 
a politician soon vanished; but with regard to 
Canadian, and generally to colonial policy, the cause 
was gained : Lord Durham's report, written by 
Charles Buller, partly under the inspiration of 
Wakefield, began a new era; its recommendations, 
extending to complete internal self-government, 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 217 

were in full operation in Canada within two or 
three years, and have been since extended to nearly 
all the other colonies, of European race, which have 
any claim to the character of important communi- 
ties. And I may say that in successfully upholding 
the reputation of Lord Durham and his advisers at 
the most important moment, I contributed materially 
to this result. 

One other case occurred during my conduct of the 
Review, which similarly illustrated the effect of taking 
a prompt initiative. I believe that the early success 
and reputation of Carlyle's French Revolution, were 
considerably accelerated by what I wrote about it in 
the Review. Immediately on its publication, and before 
the commonplace critics, all whose rules and modes of 
judgment it set at defiance, had time to pre-occupy the 
public with their disapproval of it, I wrote and pub- 
lished a review of the book, hailing it as one of those 
productions of genius which are above all rules, and 
are a law to themselves. Neither in this case nor in 
that of Lord Durham do I ascribe the impression, 
which I think was produced by what I wrote, to any 
particular merit of execution : indeed, in at least one 
of the cases (the article on Carlyle) I do not think 
the execution was good. And in both instances, I 
am persuaded that anybody, in a position to be read, 
who had expressed the same opinion at the same 
precise time, and had made any tolerable statement 



218 WHITINGS AND OTHER 

of the just grounds for it, would have produced the 
same effect. But, after the complete failure of my 
hopes of putting a new life into Radical politics by- 
means of the Review, I am glad to look back on these 
two instances of success in an honest attempt to do 
immediate service to things and persons that de- 
served it. 

After the last hope of the formation of a Radical 
party had disappeared, it was time for me to stop 
the heavy expenditure of time and money which the 
Review cost me. It had to some extent answered my 
personal purpose as a vehicle for my opinions. It had 
enabled me to express in print much of my altered 
mode of thought, and to separate myself in a marked 
manner from the narrower Benthamism of my early 
writings. This was done by the general tone of all 
I wrote, including various purely literary articles, 
but especially by the two papers (reprinted in 
the Dissertations) which attempted a philosophical 
estimate of Bentham and of Coleridge. In the first of 
these, while doing full justice to the merits of 
Bentham, I pointed out what I thought the errors 
and deficiencies of his philosophy. The substance of 
this criticism I still think perfectly just ; but I have 
sometimes doubted whether it was right to publish 
it at that time. I have often felt that Bentham's 
philosophy, as an instrument of progress, has been to 
some extent discredited before it had done its work, 



PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840. 219 

and that to lend a hand towards lowering its reputa- 
tion was doing more harm than service to improve- 
ment. Now, however, when a counter-reaction 
appears to be setting in towards what is good in 
Benthamism, I can look with more satisfaction on 
this criticism of its defects, especially as I have 
, myself balanced it by vindications of the fundamental 
principles of Benthams philosophy, which are re- 
printed along with it in the same collection. In the 
essay on Coleridge I attempted to characterize the 
European reaction against the negative philosophy of 
the eighteenth century : and here, if the effect only 
of this one paper were to be considered, I might be 
thought to have erred by giving undue prominence 
to the favourable side, as I had done in the case of 
Bentham to the unfavourable. In both cases, the 
impetus with which I had detached myself from 
what was untenable in the doctrines of Bentham and 
of the eighteenth century, may have carried me, 
though in appearance rather than in reality, too 
far on the contrary side. But as far as relates to the 
article on Coleridge, my defence is, that I was writing 
for Radicals and Liberals, and it was my business to 
dwell most on that, in writers of a different school, 
from the knowledge of which, they might derive most 
improvement. 

The number of the Review which contained the 
paper on Coleridge, was the last which was published 



220 WRITINGS, ETC., UP TO 1840. 

during my proprietorship. In the spring of 1840 I 
made over the Review to Mr, Hickson, who had 
been a frequent and very useful unpaid contributor 
under my management: only stipulating that the 
change should be marked by a resumption of the old 
name, that of Westminster Review. Under that 
name Mr. Hickson conducted it for ten years, on the 
plan of dividing among contributors only .the net 
proceeds of the Review, giving his own labour as 
writer and editor gratuitously. Under the difficulty 
in obtaining writers, which arose from this low scale 
of payment, it is highly creditable to him that he 
was able to maintain, in some tolerable degree, the 
character of the Review as an organ of radicalism 
and progress. I did not cease altogether to write 
for the Review, but continued to send it occasional 
contributions, not, however, exclusively ; for the 
greater circulation of the Edinburgh Review induced 
me from this time to offer articles to it also when I 
had anything to say for which it appeared to be a 
suitable vehicle. And the concluding volumes of 
" Democracy in America," having just then come out, 
I inaugurated myself as a contributor to the Edin- 
burgh, by the article on that work, which heads the 
second volume of the " Dissertations." 



CHAPTEE VII 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 

T^ROM this time, what is worth relating of my life 
will come into a very small compass ; for I have 
no farther mental changes to tell of, but only, as I 
hope, a continued mental progress ; which does not 
admit of a consecutive history, and the results of 
which, if real, will be best found in my writings. I 
shall, therefore, greatly abridge the chronicle of my 
subsequent years. 

The first use I made of the leisure which I gained 
by disconnecting myself from the lieview, was to 
finish the Logic. In July and August 1838, I had 
found an interval in which to execute what was still 
undone of the original draft of the Third Book. In 
working out the logical theory of those laws of 
nature which are not laws of Causation, nor corollaries 
from such laws, I was led to recognise kinds as 
realities in nature, and not mere distinctions for con- 
venience ; a light which I had not obtained when the 
First Book was written, and which made it necessary 
for me to modify and enlarge several chapters of 
that Book. The Book on Language and Classification, 



222 COMPLETION OF THE 

and the chapter on the Classification of Fallacies, were 
drafted in the autumn of the same year ; the re- 
mainder of the work, in the summer and autumn of 
1840. From April following, to the end of 1841, my 
spare time was devoted to a complete re- writing of 
the book from its commencement. It is in this way 
that all my books have been composed. They were 
always written at least twice over ; a first draft of 
the entire work was completed to the very end of 
the subject, then the whole begun again de novo ; 
but incorporating, in the second writing, all sentences 
and parts of sentences of the old draft, which ap- 
peared as suitable to my purpose as anything which 
I could write in lieu of them. I have found great 
advantages in this system of double redaction. It 
combines, better than any other mode of composition, 
the freshness and vigour of the first conception, with 
the superior precision and completeness resulting [ 
from prolonged thought. In my own case, moreover, 
I have found that the patience necessary for a 
careful elaboration of the details of composition and 
expression, costs much less effort after the entire 
subject has been once gone through, and the 
substance of all that I find to say has in some 
manner, however imperfect, been got upon paper. 
The only thing which I am careful, in the first draft, 
to make as perfect as I am able, is the arrangement. 
If that is bad, the whole thread on which the ideas 



SYSTEM OF LOGIC. 223 

string themselves becomes twisted ; thoughts placed 
in a wrong connexion are not expounded in a manner 
that suits the right, and a first draft with this 
original vice is next to useless as a foundation for 
the final treatment. 

During the re-writing of the Logic, Dr. WhewelTs 
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences made its 
appearance ; a circumstance fortunate for me, as it 
gave me what I greatly desired, a full treatment of 
the subject by an antagonist, and enabled me to 
present my ideas with greater clearness and emphasis 
as well as fuller and more varied development, in 
defending them against definite objections, or con- 
fronting them distinctly with an opposite theory. 
The controversies with Dr. Whewell, as well as much 
matter derived from Comte, were first introduced 
into the book in the course of the re-writing. 

At the end of 1841, the book being ready for the 
press, I offered it to Murray, who kept it until too 
late for publication that season, and then refused it, 
for reasons which could just as well have been given 
at first. But I have had no cause to regret a rejection 
which led to my offering it to Mr. Parker, by whom it 
was published in the spring of 1843. My original ex- 
pectations of success were extremely limited. Arch- 
bishop Whately had, indeed, rehabilitated the name 
of Logic, and the study of the forms, rules, and 
fallacies of Ratiocination ; and Dr. WhewelTs 



224 COMPLETION OF THE 

writings had begun to excite an interest in the 
other part of my subject, the theory of Induction. 
A treatise, however, on a matter so abstract, could 
not be expected to be popular ; it could only be a 
book for students, and students on such subjects 
were not only (at least in England) few, but ad- 
dicted chiefly to the opposite school of metaphysics, 
the ontological and " innate principles " school. I 
therefore did not expect that the book would have 
many readers, or approvers ; and looked for little 
practical effect from it, save that of keeping the 
tradition unbroken of what I thought a better philo- 
sophy. What hopes I had of exciting any im- 
mediate attention, were mainly grounded on the 
polemical propensities of Dr. Whewell ; who, I 
thought, from observation of his conduct in other 
cases, would probably do something to bring the 
book into notice, by replying, and that promptly, to 
the attack on his opinions. He did reply, but not 
till 1850, just in time for me to answer him in the 
third edition. How the book came to have, for a < 
work of the kind, so much success, and what sort of 
persons compose the bulk of those who have bought, 
I will not venture to say read, it, I have never i 
thoroughly understood. But taken in conjunction 
with the many proofs which have since been given 
of a revival of speculation, speculation too of a free 
kind, in many quarters, and above all (where at one 

•i 



SYSTEM OF LOGIC* 225 

! time I should have least expected it) in the Uni- 
versities, the fact becomes partially intelligible. I 
| have never indulged the illusion that the book had 
I made any considerable impression on philosophical 
■ opinion. The German, or a priori view of human 
: knowledge, and of the knowing faculties, is likely for 
: some time longer (though it may be hoped in a 
is diminishing degree) to predominate among those who 
occupy themselves with such inquiries, both here and 
on the Continent. But the " System of Logic " 
supplies what was much wanted, a text-book of the 
opposite doctrine — that which derives all knowledge 
from experience, and all moral and intellectual 
qualities principally from the direction given to the 
associations. I make as humble an estimate as any- 
body of what either an analysis of logical processes, 
or any possible canons of evidence, can do by them- 
selves, towards guiding or rectifying the operations 
of the understanding. Combined with other re- 
quisites, I certainly do think them of great use ; 
but whatever may be the practical value of a true 
philosophy of these matters, it is hardly possible to 
exaggerate the mischiefs of a false one. The 
notion that truths external to the mind may be 
known by intuition or consciousness, independently 
of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in 
these times, the great intellectual support of false 
doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this 

Q 



226 COMPLETION OF THE 

theory, every inveterate belief and every intense 
feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is 
enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying 
itself by reason, and is erected into its own all- 
sufficient voucher and justification. There never 
was such an instrument devised for consecrating all 
deep-seated prejudices. And the chief strength of 
this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, 
lies in the appeal which it is accustomed to make to 
the evidence of mathematics and of the cognate 
branches of physical science. To expel rfc from these, 
is to drive it from its stronghold : and because this 
had never been effectually done, the intuitive school, 
even after what my father had written in his Analysis 
of the Mind, had in appearance, and as far as 
published writings were concerned, on the w^hole the 
best of the argument. In attempting to clear up the 
real nature of the evidence of mathematical and 
physical truths, the " System of Logic " met the 
intuitive philosophers on ground on which they had 
previously been deemed unassailable ; and gave its 
own explanation, from experience and association, 
of that peculiar character of what are called necessary 
truths, which is adduced as proof that their evidence 
must come from a deeper source than experience. 
Whether this has been done effectually, is still sub 
judice ; and even then, to deprive a mode of thought so 
strongly rooted in human prejudices and partialities, 



SYSTEM OF LOGIC. 227 

of its mere speculative support, goes but a very little 

way towards overcoming it ; but though only a step, 

it is a quite indispensable one ; for since, after all, 

prejudice can only be successfully combated by 

philosophy, no way can really be made against it 

■ permanently until it has been shown not to have 

| philosophy on its side. 

Being now released from any active concern in 

temporary politics, and from any literary occupation 

, involving personal communication with contributors 

I and others, I was enabled to indulge the inclination, 

i natural to thinking persons when the age of boyish 

vanity is once past, for limiting my own society to 

a very few persons. General society, as now carried 
i 
; on in England, is so insipid an affair, even to the 

I persons who make it what it is, that it is kept up 
| for any reason rather than the pleasure it affords. 
All serious discussion on matters on which opinions 
differ, being considered ill-bred, and the national 
deficiency in liveliness and sociability having pre- 
vented the cultivation of the art of talking agreeably 
on trifles, in which the French of the last century so 
much excelled, the sole attraction of what is called 
society to those who are not at the top of the tree, is 
the hope of being aided to climb a little higher in it; 
while to those who are already at the top, it is chiefly 
a compliance with custom, and with the supposed 
requirements of their station. To a person of any 

Q 2 



228 GENERAL VIEW OF 

but a very common order in thought of feeling, such 
society, unless he has personal objects to serve by it, 
must be supremely unattractive : and most people, 
in the present day, of any really high class of in- 
tellect, make their contact with it so slight, and at 
such long intervals, as to be almost considered as 
retiring from it altogether. Those persons of any 
mental superiority who do otherwise, are, almost 
without exception, greatly deteriorated by it. Not 
to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is 
lowered : they become less in earnest about those of 
their opinions respecting which they must remain 
silent in the society they frequent : they come to 
look upon their most elevated objects as unpractical, 
or, at least, too remote from realization to be more 
than a vision, or a theory ; and if, more fortunate 
than most, they retain their higher principles unim- 
paired, yet with respect to the persons and affairs of 
their own day they insensibly adopt the modes of 
feeling and judgment in which they can hope for 
sympathy from the company they keep. A person 
of high intellect should never go into unintellectual 
I society unless he can enter it as an apostle ; yet he 
is the only person with high objects who can safely 
enter it at all. Persons even of intellectual aspira- 
tions had much better, if they can, make their 
habitual associates of at least their equals, and, as 
far as possible, their superiors, in knowledge, intel- 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 229 

lect, and elevation of sentiment. Moreover, if the 
character is formed, and the mind made up, on the 
few cardinal points of human opinion, agreement of 
conviction and feeling on these, has been felt in all 
times to be an essential requisite of anything 
worthy the name of friendship, in a really earnest 
mind. All these circumstances united, made the 
number very small of those whose society, and 
still more whose intimacy, I now voluntarily 
sought. 

Among these, the principal was the incomparable 
friend of whom I have already spoken. At this 
period she lived mostly with one young daughter, 
in a quiet part of the country, and only occasionally 
in town, with her first husband, Mr. Taylor. I 
visited her equally in both places ; and was greatly 
indebted to the strength of character which enabled 
her to disregard the false interpretations liable to be 
put on the frequency of my visits to her while living 
generally apart from Mr. Taylor, and on our occa- 
sionally travelling together, though in all other 
respects our conduct during those years gave not 
the slightest ground for any other supposition than 
the true one, that our relation to each other at that 
time was one of strong affection and confidential 
intimacy only. For though we did not consider the 
ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely 
personal, we did feel bound that our conduct should 



230 GENERAL VIEW OF 

be such as in no degree to bring discredit on her 
husband, nor therefore on herself. 

In this third period (as it may be termed) of my 
mental progress, which now went hand in hand with 
hers, my opinions gained equally in breadth and 
depth, I understood more things, and those which I 
had understood before, I now understood more 
thoroughly. I had now completely turned back 
from what there had been of excess in my reaction 
against Benthamism. I had, at the height of that 
reaction, certainly become much more indulgent to 
the common opinions of society and the world, and 
more willing to be content with seconding the super- 
ficial improvement which had begun to take place 
in those common opinions, than became one whose 
convictions, on so many points, differed fundamentally 
from them. I was much more inclined, than I can 
now approve, to put in abeyance the more decidedly 
heretical part of my opinions, which I now look upon 
as almost the only ones, the assertion of which tends 
in any way to regenerate society. But in addition 
to this, our opinions were far more heretical than 
mine had been in the days of my most extreme 
Benthamism. In those days I had seen little further 
than the old school of political economists into the 
possibilities of fundamental improvement in social 
arrangements. Private property, as now understood, 
and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 231 

dernier mot of legislation : and I looked no further 
than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on 
these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture 
and entails. The notion that it was possible to go 
further than this in removing the injustice — for in- 
justice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy 
or not — involved in the fact that some are born 
to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then 
reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by uni- 
versal education, leading to voluntary restraint on 
population, the portion of the poor might be made 
more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but 
not the least of a Socialist. We were now much 
less democrats than I had been, because so long as 
education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, 
we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfish- 
ness and brutality of the mass : but our ideal of ulti- 
mate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and 
would class us decidedly under the general designation 
of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest 
energy that tyranny of society over the individual 
which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, 
we yet looked forward to a time when society will no 
longer be divided into the idle and the industrious ; 
when the rule that they who do not work shall not 
eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impar- 
tially to all ; when the division of the produce of 
labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree 



232 GENERAL VIEW OF 

it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by 
concert on an acknowledged principle of justice ; 
and when it will no longer either be, or be thought 
to be, impossible for human beings to exert them- 
selves strenuously in procuring benefits which are 
not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared 
with the society they belong to. The social problem 
of the future we considered to be, how to unite the 
greatest individual liberty of action, with a common 
ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an 
equal participation of all in the benefits of combined 
labour. We had not the presumption to suppose 
tha,t we could already foresee, by what precise form 
of institutions these objects could most effectually be 
attained, or at how near or how distant a period 
they would become practicable. We saw clearly 
that to render any such social transformation either 
possible or desirable, an equivalent change of 
character must take place both in the uncultivated 
herd who now compose the labouring masses, and in 
the immense majority of their employers. Both these 
classes must learn by practice to labour and combine 
for generous, or at all events for public and social 
purposes, and not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly 
interested ones. But the capacity to do this lias 
always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever 
likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and the culti- 
vation of the sentiments, will make a common man 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 233 

dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight for 
his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, 
and a system of culture prolonged through successive 
generations, that men in general can be brought up 
to this point. But the hindrance is not in the 
essential constitution of human nature. Interest in 
the common good is at present so weak a motive in 
the generality, not because it can never be other- 
wise, but because the mind is not accustomed to 
dwell on it as it dwells from morning till night on 
things which tend only to personal advantage. When 
called into activity, as only self-interest now is, by the 
daily course of life, and spurred from behind by the 
love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable 
of producing, even in common men, the most strenuous 
exertions as well as the most heroic sacrifices. The 
deep-rooted selfishness which forms the general 
character of the existing state of society, is so deeply 
rooted, only because the whole course of existing 
institutions tends to foster it ; and modern institutions 
in some respects more than ancient, since the occa- 
sion on which the individual is called on to do any- 
thing for the public without receiving its pay, are 
far less frequent in modern life, than in the smaller 
commonwealths of antiquity. These considerations 
did not make us overlook the folly of premature 
attempts to dispense with the inducements of pri- 
vate interest in social affairs, while no substitute for 



234 PUBLICATION OF THE 

them has been or can be provided : but we regarded 
all existing institutions and social arrangements as 
being (in a phrase I once heard from Austin) " merely 
provisional," and we welcomed with the greatest . 
pleasure and interest all socialistic experiments by 
select individuals (such as the Co-operative Societies), 
which, whether they succeeded or failed, could not 
but operate as a most useful education of those who 
took part in them, by cultivating their capacity 
of acting upon motives pointing directly to the general 
good, or making them aware of the defects which 
render them and others incapable of doing so. 

In the " Principles of Political Economy/' these 
opinions were promulgated, less clearly and fully in 
the first edition, rather more so in the second, and 
quite unequivocally in the third. The difference 
arose partly from the change of times, the first edition 
having been written and sent to press before the 
French Revolution of 1848, after which the public 
mind became more open to the reception of novelties 
in opinion, and doctrines appeared moderate which 
would have been thought very startling a short time 
before. In the first edition the difficulties of 
socialism were stated so strongly, that the tone was 
on the whole that of opposition to it. In the year or 
two which followed, much time was given to the 
study of the best Socialistic writers on the Continent, 
and to meditation and discussion on the whole range 



PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 235 

of topics involved in the controversy : and the result 
was that most of what had been written on the 
subject in the first edition was cancelled, and replaced 
by arguments and reflections which represent a more 
advanced opinion. 

The Political Economy was far more rapidly 
executed than the Logic, or indeed than anything 
of importance which I had previously written. It 
was commenced in the autumn of 1845, and was 
ready for the press before the end of 1847. In this 
period of little more than two years there was an 
interval of six months during which the work was 
laid aside, while I was writing articles in the Morning 
Chronicle (which unexpectedly entered warmly into 
my purpose) urging the formation of peasant proper- 
ties on the waste lands of Ireland. This was during 
the period of the Famine, the winter of 1846-47, 
when the stern necessities of the time seemed to 
afford a chance of gaining attention for what appeared 
to me the only mode of combining relief to immediate 
destitution with permanent improvement of the 
social . and economical condition of the Irish people. 
But the idea was new and strange : there was no 
English precedent for such a proceeding : and the 
profound ignorance of English politicians and the 
English public concerning all social phenomena not 
generally met with in England (however common 
elsewhere), made my endeavours an entire failure- 



236 PUBLICATION OF THE 

Instead of a great operation on the waste lands, and 
the conversion of cottiers into proprietors, Parliament 
passed a Poor Law for maintaining them as paupers : 
and if the nation has not since found itself in inex- 
tricable difficulties from the joint operation of the 
old evils and the quack remedy, it is indebted for its 
deliverance to that most unexpected and surprising 
fact, the depopulation of Ireland, commenced by 
famine, and continued by emigration. 

The rapid success of the Political Economy showed 
that the public wanted, and were prepared for such 
a book. Published early in 1848, an edition of a 
thousand copies was sold in less than a year. Another 
similar edition was published in the spring of 1849 ; 
and a third, of 1250 copies, early in 1852. It was, 
from the first, continually cited and referred to as 
an authority, because it was not a book merely of 
abstract science, but also of application, and treated 
Political Economy not as a thing by itself, but as a 
fragment of a greater whole ; a branch of Social 
Philosophy, so interlinked with all the other 
branches, that its conclusions, even in its own pecu- 
liar province, are only true conditionally, subject to 
interference and counteraction from causes not 
directly within its scope : while to the character of 
a practical guide it has no pretension, apart from 
other classes of considerations. Political Economy, 
in truth, has never pretended to give advice to 



PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 237 

mankind with no lights but its own ; though people 
who knew nothing but political economy (and there- 
fore knew that ill) have taken upon themselves to 
advise, and could only do so by such lights as they 
had. Bat the numerous sentimental enemies of 
political economy, and its still more numerous in- 
terested enemies in sentimental guise, have been 
very successful in gaining belief for this among other 
unmerited imputations against it, and the " Princi- 
ples" having, in spite of the freedom of many of its 
opinions, become for the present the most popular 
treatise on the subject, has helped to disarm, the 
enemies of so important a study. The amount of its 
worth as an exposition of the science, and the value 
of the different applications which it suggests, others 
of course must judge. 

For a considerable time after this, I published no 
work of magnitude ; though I still occasionally wrote 
in periodicals, and my correspondence (much of it 
with persons quite unknown to me), on subjects of 
public interest, swelled to a considerable bulk. 
During these years I wrote or commenced various 
Essays, for eventual publication, on some of the fun- 
damental questions of human and social life, with 
regard to several of which I have already much 
exceeded the severity of the Horatian precept. I 
continued to watch with keen interest the progress 
of public events. But it was not, on the whole, 



238 GENERAL VIEW OF 

very encouraging to me. The European reaction 
after 1848, and the success of an unprincipled 
usurper in December, 1851, put an end, as it seemed, 
to all present hope of freedom or social improvement 
in France and the Continent. In England, I had 
seen and continued to see many of the opinions of 
my youth obtain general recognition, and many of 
the reforms in institutions, for which I had through 
life contended, either effected or in course of being 
so. But these changes had been attended with 
much less benefit to human well-being than I should 
formerly have anticipated, because they had produced 
very little improvement in that which all real amelio- 
ration in the lot of mankind depends on, their 
intellectual and moral state : and it might even be 
questioned if the various causes of deterioration 
which had been at work in the meanwhile, had not 
more than counterbalanced the tendencies to improve- 
ment. I had learnt from experience that many false 
opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in 
the least altering the habits of mind of which false 
opinions are the result. The English public, for 
example, are quite as raw and undiscernnig on 
subjects of political economy since the nation has 
been converted to free-trade, as they were before ; 
and are still further from having acquired better 
habits of thought or feeling, or being in any way 
better fortified against error, on subjects of a more 
elevated character. For, though they have thrown 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 239 

off certain errors, the general discipline of their 
minds, intellectually and morally, is not altered. I 
am now convinced, that no great improvements in 
the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change 
takes place in the fundamental constitution of their 
modes of thought. The old opinions in religion, 
morals, and politics, are so much discredited in the 
more intellectual minds as to have lost the greater 
part of their efficacy for good, while they have still 
life enough in them to be a powerful obstacle to the 
growing up of any better opinions on those subjects. 
When the philosophic minds of the world can no 
longer believe its religion, or can only believe it with 
modifications amounting to an essential change of its 
character, a transitional period commences, of weak 
convictions, paralysed intellects, and growing laxity 
of principle, which cannot terminate until a renova- 
tion has been effected in the basis of their belief, 
leading to the evolution of some faith, whether 
religious or merely human, which they can really 
believe : and when things are in this state, all think- 
ing or writing which does not tend to promote such 
a renovation, is of very little value beyond the 
moment. Since there was little in the apparent 
condition of the public mind, indicative of any ten- 
dency in this direction, my view of the immediate 
prospects of human improvement was not sanguine. 
More recently a spirit of free speculation has sprung 
up, giving a more encouraging prospect of the gradual 



240 MARRIAGE. 

mental emancipation of England ; and concurring with 
tlie renewal under better auspices, of the movement 
for political freedom in the rest of Europe, has given 
to the present condition of human affairs a more 
hopeful aspect.* 

Between the time of which I have now spoken, 
and the present, took place the most important 
events of my private life. The first of these was my 
marriage, in April, 1851, to the lady whose incom- 
parable worth had made her friendship the greatest 
source to me both of happiness and of improvement, 
during many years in which we never expected to 
be in any closer relation to one another. Ardently 
as I should have aspired to this complete union of 
our lives at any time in the course of my existence 
at which it had been practicable, I, as much as my 
wife, would far rather have foregone that privilege 
for ever, than have owed it to the premature death 
of one for whom I had the sincerest respect, and she 
the strongest affection. That event, however, having 
taken place in July, 1849, it was granted to me to 
derive from that evil my own greatest good, by 
adding to the partnership of thought, feeling, and 
writing which had long existed, a partnership of our 
entire existence. For seven and a-half years that 
blessing was mine ; for seven and a-half only ! I 



Written about 1861. 



MARRIAGE. 241 

can say nothing which could describe, even in the 
faintest manner, what that loss was and is. But 
because I know that she would have wished it, I 
endeavour to make the best of what life I have left, 
and to work on for her purposes with such diminished 
strength as can be derived from thoughts of her, and 
communion with her memory. 

When two persons have their thoughts and specu- 
lations completely in common ; when all subjects of 
intellectual or moral interest are discussed between 
them in daily life, and probed to much greater 
depths than are usually or conveniently sounded in 
writings intended for general readers ; when they set 
out from the same principles, and arrive at their 
conclusions by processes pursued jointly, it is of 
little consequence in respect to the question of origi- 
nality, which of them holds the pen ; the one who 
contributes least to the composition may contribute 
most to the thought ; the writings which result are 
the joint product of both, and it must often be im- 
possible to disentangle their respective parts, and 
affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other. 
In this wide sense, not only during the years of our 
married life, but during many of the yei-is of con- 
fidential friendship which preceded, all my published 
writings were as much her work as mine ; her share 
in them constantly increasing as years advanced. 
But in certain cases, what belongs to her can be 

B 



242 MARRIAGE. 

distinguished, and specially identified. "Over and 
above the general influence which her mind had over 
mine, the most valuable ideas and features in these 
joint productions — those which have been most fruit- 
ful of important results, and have contributed most 
to the success and reputation of the works them- 
selves — originated with her, were emanations from 
her mind, my part in them being no greater than in 
any of the thoughts which I found in previous 
writers, and made my own only by incorporating 
them with my own system of thought. During the 
greater part of my literary life I have performed the 
office in relation to her, which from a rather early 
period I had considered as the most useful part that 
I was qualified to take in the domain of thought, 
that of an interpreter of original thinkers, and 
mediator between them and the public ; for I had 
always a humble opinion of my own powers as an 
original thinker, except in abstract science (logic, 
metaphysics, and the theoretic principles of political 
economy and politics), but thought myself much 
superior to most of my contemporaries hi willing- 
ness and ability to learn from everybody ; as I found 
hardly any one who made such a point of examining 
what was said in defence of all opinions, however 
nev or however old, in the conviction that even if 
they were errors there might be a substratum of 
truth underneath them, and that in any case the 



MARRIAGE. ^ 243 

discovery of what it was that made them plausible, 
would be a benefit to truth. I had, in consequence, 
marked this out as a sphere of usefulness in which I. 
was under a special obligation to make myself active : 
the more so, as the acquaintance I had formed with 
the ideas of the Coleridgians, of the German thinkers, 
and of Carlyle, all of them fiercely opposed to the 
mode of thought in which I had been brought up, 
had convinced me that along with much error they 
possessed much truth, which was veiled from minds 
otherwise capable of receiving it by the transcen- 
dental and mystical phraseology in which they were 
accustomed to shut it up, and from which they 
neither cared, nor knew how, to disengage it ; and I 
did not despair of separating the truth from the 
error, and exposing it in terms which would be 
intelligible and not repulsive to those on my own 
side in philosophy Thus prepared, it will easily be 
believed that when I came into close intellectual 
communion with a person of the most eminent 
faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded 
itself in thought, continually struck out truths far 
in advance of me, but in which I could not, as I had 
done in those others, detect any mixture of error, 
the greatest part of my mental growth consisted in 
the assimilation of those truths, and the most 
valuable part of my intellectual work was in 
building the bridges and clearing the paths which 

R 2 



244 MARRIAGE. 

connected them with my general system of 
thought. * 

The first of my books in which her share was con- 
spicuous was the " Principles of Political Economy." 
The " System of Logic " owed little to her except in 
the minuter matters of composition, in which respect 



* The steps in my mental growth for which I was indebted to her were 
far from being those which a person wholly uninformed on the subject 
would probably suspect. It might be supposed, for instance, that my 
strong convictions on the complete equality in all legal, political, social 
and domestic relations, which ought to exist between men and women, 
may have been adopted or learnt from her. This was so far from being 
the fact, that those convictions were among the earliest results of the ap- 
plication of my mind to political subjects, and the strength with which 
I held them was, as I believe, more than anything else, the originating 
cause of the interest she felt in me. What is true is, that until I knew 
her, the opinion was in my mind, little more than an abstract principle. 
I saw no more reason why women should be held in legal subjection to 
other people, than why men should. I was certain that their interests 
required fully as much protection as those of men, and were quite as 
little likely to obtain it without an equal voice in making the laws 
by which they were to be bound. But that perception of the vast 
practical bearings of women's disabilities which found expression in 
the book on the " Subjection of Women' 1 was acquired mainly through 
her teaching. But for her rare knowledge of human nature and com- 
prehension of moral and social influences, though I should doubtless 
have held my present opinions, I should have had a very insufficient 
perception of the mode in which the consequences of the inferior position 
of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of existing society 
and with all the difficulties of human improvement. I am indeed pain- 
fully conscious of how much of her best thoughts on the subject I 
have failed to reproduce, and how greatly that little treatise falfo 
short of what would hava been if she had put on paper her entire 
mind on this question, or had lived to revise and improve, as she 
certainly would have done, my imperfect statement of the case. 



MARRIAGE. 245 

my writings, both great and small, have largely 
benefited by her accurate and clear-sighted criticism.* 
The chapter of the Political Economy which has had 
a greater influence on opinion than all the rest, that 
on " the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes " 
is entirely due to her : in the first draft of the book, 
that chapter did not exist. She pointed out the 
need of such a chapter, and the extreme imperfection 
of the book without it : she was the cause of my 
writing it ; and the more general part of the chapter, 
the statement and discussion of the two opposite 
theories respecting the proper condition of the 
labouring classes, was wholly an exposition of her 



* The only person from whom I received any direct assistance in 
the preparation of the System of Logic was Mr. Bain, since so justly 
celebrated for his philosophical writings. He went carefully through 
the manuscript before it was sent to press, and enriched it with a 
great number of additional examples and illustrations from science ; 
many of which, as well as some detached remarks of his own in con- 
firmation of my logical views, I inserted nearly in his own words. 

My obligations to Comte were only to his writings — to the part 
which had then been published of his " Systeme de Philosophie 
Positive :" and, as has been seen from what I have already said in this 
narrative, the amount of these obligations is far less than has some- 
times been asserted. The first volume, which ontains all the funda- 
mental doctrines of the book, was substantia y complete oefore I had 
seen Comte's treatise. I derived from him many valuable thoughts, 
conspicuously in the chapter on Hypotheses and in the view taken 
of the logic of Algebra : but it is only in the concluding Book, on the 
Logic of the Moral Sciences, that I owe to him any radical improve- 
ment in my conception of the application of logical method. This 
improvement I have stated and characterized in a former part of the 
preseat Memoir. 



246 MAEKTAGE. 

thoughts, often in words taken from hbr own lips. 
The purely scientific part of the Political Economy I 
did not learn from her ; but it was chiefly her in- 
fluence that gave to the book that general tone by 
which, it is distinguished from all previous exposi- 
tions of Political Economy that had any pretension 
to being scientific, and which has made it so useful 
in conciliating minds which those previous exposi- 
tions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly in 
making the proper distinction between the laws of 
the Production of Wealth, which are real laws of 
nature, dependent on the properties of objects, and 
the modes of its Distribution, which, subject to cer- 
tain conditions, depend on human will. The common 
run of political economists confuse these together, 
under the designation of economic laws, which they 
deem incapable of being defeated or modified by 
human effort ; ascribing the same necessity to things 
dependent on the unchangeable conditions of our 
earthly existence, and to those which, being but the 
necessary consequences of particular social arrange- 
ments, are merely co-extensive with these : given 
certain institutions and customs, wages, profits, and 
rent will be determined by certain causes ; but this 
class of political economists drop the indispensable 
presupposition, and argue that these causes must, by 
an inherent necessity, against which no human means 
can avail, determine the shares which fall, in the 



MARRIAGE. 247 

division of the produce, to labourers, capitalists, and 
landlords. The " Principles of Political Economy' ' 
yielded to none of its predecessors in aiming at the 
scientific appreciation of the action of these causes, 
under the conditions which they presuppose ; but it 
set the example of not treating those conditions as 
final. The economic generalizations which depend, 
not on necessities of nature but on those combined 
with the existing arrangements of society, it deals 
with only as provisional, and as liable to be much 
altered by the progress of social improvement. I 
had indeed partially learnt this view of things from 
the thoughts awakened in me by the speculations of 
the St. Simonians ; but it was made a living prin- 
ciple pervading and animating the book by my wife's 
promptings. This example illustrates well the 
general character of what she contributed to my 
writings. What was abstract and purely scientific 
was generally mine ; the properly human element 
came from her : in all that concerned the application 
of philosophy to the exigencies of human society 
and progress, I was her pupil, alike in boldness of 
speculation and cautiousness of practical judgment. 
For, on the one hand, she was much more courageous 
and far-sighted than without her I should have been, 
j in anticipations of an order of things to come, in 
j which many of the limited generalizations now so 
| often confounded with universal principles will cease 



248 RETIREMENT FKOM 

to be applicable. Those parts of my writings, and 
especially of the Political Economy, which con- 
template possibilities in the future such as, when 
affirmed by socialists, have in general been fiercely 
denied by political economists, would, but for her, 
either have been absent, or the suggestions would 
have been made much more timidly and in a more i 
qualified form. But while she thus rendered me 
bolder in speculation on human affairs, her practical 
turn of mind, and her almost unerring estimate of ; 
practical obstacles, repressed in me all tendencies 
that were really visionary. Her mind invested all 
ideas in a concrete shape, and formed to itself a 
conception of how they would actually work : and 
her knowledge of the existing feelings and conduct 
of mankind was so seldom at fault, that the weak 
point in any unworkable suggestion seldom escaped 
her.* 

During the years which intervened between the 
commencement of my married life and the cata- 
strophe which closed it, the principal occurrences of 
my outward existence (unless I count as such a first 
attack of the family disease, and a consequent journey 
; of more than six months for the recovery of health, in 



* A few dedicatory lines acknowledging what the book owed to her, 
were prefixed to some of the presentation copies of the Political 
Economy on its rirst publication. Her dislike of publicity alone ^rd* 
vented their insertion in the other copies of the work, 



THE INDIA HOUSE. 249 

Italy, Sicily, and Greece) had reference to my posi- 
tion in the India House. In 1856 I was promoted 
to the rank of chief of the office in which I had 
served for upwards of thirty-three years. The ap- 
pointment, that of Examiner of India Correspondence, 
was the highest, next to that of Secretary, in the 
East India Company's home service, involving the 
general superintendence of all the correspondence 
with the Indian Governments, except the military, 
naval, and financial. I held this office as long as it 
continued to exist, being a little more than two 
years ; after which it pleased Parliament, in other 
words Lord Palmerston, to put an end to the East 
India Company as a branch of the Government of 
India under the Crown, and convert the adminis- 
tration of that country into a thing to be scrambled 
for by the second and third class of English parlia- 
mentary politicians. I was the chief manager of the 
resistance which the Company made to their own 
political extinction, and to the letters and petitions 
I wrote for them, and the concluding chapter of my 
treatise on Representative Government, I must refer 
for my opinions on the folly and mischief of this ill- 
considered change. Personally I considered myself 
a gainer by it, as I had given enough of my life to 
India, and was not unwilling to retire .on the liberal 
compensation granted. After the change was con- 
summated, Lord Stanley, the First Secretary of 



250 RETIREMENT FROM 

State for India, made me the honourable offer of 
a seat in the Council, and the proposal was subse- 
quently renewed by the Council itself, on the first 
occasion of its having to supply a vacancy in its own 
body. But the conditions of Indian Government 
under the new system made me anticipate nothing 
but useless vexation and waste of effort from any 
participation in it : and nothing that has since hap- 
pened has had any tendency to make me regret my 
refusal. 

During the two years which immediately preceded 
the cessation of my official life, my wife and I were 
working together at the " Liberty." I had first 
planned and written it as a short essay in 1854. It 
was in mounting the steps of the Capitol, in January, 
1855, that the thought first arose of converting it 
into a volume. None of my writings have been 
either so carefully composed, or so sedulously cor- 
rected as this. After it had been written as usual 
twice over, we kept it by us, bringing it out from 
time to time, and going through it de novo, reading, 
weighing, and criticising every sentence. Its final 
revision was to have been a work of the winter of 
1858-9, the first after my retirement, which we had 
arranged to pass in the South of Europe. That 
hope and every other were frustrated by the most 
unexpected and bitter calamity of her death — at 
Avignon, on our way to Montpellier, from a sudden 
attack of pulmonary congestion. 



THE INDIA HOUSE. 251 

Since tlien I have sought for such alleviation as 
my state admitted of, by the mode of life which 
most enabled me to feel her still near me. I bought 
a cottage as close as possible to the place where she 
is buried, and there her daughter (my fellow- 
sufferer and now my chief comfort) and I, live 
constantly during a great portion of the year. My 
objects in life are solely those which were hers ; my 
pursuits and occupations those in which she shared, 
or sympathized, and which are indissolubly asso- 
ciated with her. Her memory is to me a religion, 
and her approbation the standard by which, sum- 
ming up as it does all worthiness, I endeavour to 
regulate my life.* 

After my irreparable loss, one of my earliest cares 
was to print and publish the treatise, so much of 
which was the work of her whom I had lost, and 
consecrate it to her memory. I have made no altera- 
tion or addition to it, nor shall I ever. Though it 
wants the last touch of her hand, no substitute for 
that touch shall ever be attempted by mine. 

The " Liberty" was more directly and literally our 
joint production than anything else which bears my 
name, for there was not a sentence of it which was 
not several times gone through by us together, turned 
over in many ways, and carefully weeded of any 



* What precedes was written or revised previous to, or during the 

year L8h] . Wh it follows was written in 1870. 



252 PUBLICATION OF 

• 

faults, either in thought or expression, that we 
detected in it. It is in consequence of this that, 
although it never underwent her final revision, it far 
surpasses, as a mere specimen of composition, anything 
which has proceeded from me either before or since. 
With regard to the thoughts, it is difficult to identify 
any particular part or element as being more hers 
than all the rest. The whole mode of thinking of 
which the book was the expression, was emphatically 
hers. But I also was so thoroughly imbued with it, 
that the same thoughts naturally occurred to us 
both. That I was thus penetrated with it, however, 
I owe in a great degree to her. There was a moment 
in my mental progress when I might easily have 
fallen into a tendency towards over-government, both | 
social and political; as there was also a moment 
when, by reaction from a contrary excess, I might 
have become a less thorough radical and democrat 
than I am. In both these points, as in many others, 
she benefited me as much by keeping me right where 
I was right, as by leading me to new truths, and , 
ridding me of errors. My great readiness and eager- 
ness to learn from everybody, and to make room in 
my opinions for every new acquisition by adjusting 
the old and the new to one another, might, but for 
her steadying influence, have seduced me into 
modifying my early opinions too much. She was 
in nothing more valuable to my mental development 



" LIBERTY. " 253 

than by her just measure of the relative importance 
of different considerations, which often protected me 
from allowing to truths I had only recently learnt to 
see, a more important place in my thoughts than was 
properly their due. 

The " Liberty" is likely to survive longer than 
anything else that I have written (with the possible 
exception of the " Logic"), because the conjunction 
of her mind w^ith mine has rendered it a kind of 
philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the 
changes progressively taking place in modern society 
tend to bring out into ever stronger relief: the impor- 
tance, to man and society, of a large variety in types 
of character, and of giving full freedom to human 
nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting 
directions. Nothing can better show how deep are 
the foundations of this truth, than the great impres- 
sion made by the exposition of it at a time which, 
to superficial observation, did not seem to stand 
much in need of such a lesson. The fears we ex- 
pressed, lest the inevitable growth of social equality 
and of the government of public opinion, should 
impose on mankind an oppressive yoke of uniformity 
in opinion and practice, might easily have appeared 
chimerical to those who looked more at present facts 
than at tendencies ; for the gradual revolution that is 
taking place in society and institutions has, thus far, 
been decidedly favourable to the development of new 



254 PUBLICATION OF 

opinions, and has procured for them a much more un- 
prejudiced hearing than they previously met with. 
But this is a feature belonging to periods of transition, 
when old notions and feelings have been unsettled, 
and no new doctrines have yet succeeded to their 
ascendancy. At such times people of any mental 
activity, having given up their old beliefs, and not 
feeling quite sure that those they still retain can 
stand unmodified, listen eagerly to new opinions. 
But this state of things is necessarily transitory : 
some particular body of doctrine in time rallies the 
majority round it, organizes social institutions and 
modes of action conformably to itself, education im- 
presses this new creed upon the new generations with- 
out the mental processes that have led to it, and by 
degrees it acquires the very same power of com- 
pression, so long exercised by the creeds of which 
it had taken the place. Whether this noxious power 
will be exercised, depends on whether mankind have 
by that time become aware that it cannot be exercised 
without stunting and dwarfing human nature. It is 
then that the teachings of the " Liberty" will have 
their greatest value. And it is to be feared that they 
will retain that value a long time. 

As regards originality, it has of course no other 
than that which every thoughtful mind gives to its 
own mode of conceiving and expressing truths which 
are common property. The leading thought of the 



" LIBERTY. " 255 

book is one which though in many ages confined to 
insulated thinkers, mankind have probably at no 
time since the beginning of civilization been entirely 
without. To speak only of the last few generations, 
it is distinctly contained in the vein of important 
thought respecting education and culture, spread 
through the European mind by the labours and 
genius of Pestalozzi. The unqualified championship 
of it by Wilhelm von Humboldt is referred to in the 
book ; but he by no means stood alone in his own 
country. During the early part of the present 
century the doctrine of the rights of individuality, 
and the claim of the moral nature to develope itself 
in its ©wn way, was pushed by a whole school of 
German authors even to exaggeration ; and the 
writings of Goethe, the most celebrated of all 
German authors, though not belonging to that or to 
any other school, are penetrated throughout by 
views of morals and of conduct in life, often in my 
opinion not defensible, but which are incessantly 
seeking whatever defence they admit of in the 
theory of the right and duty of self-development. In 
our own country, before the book " On Liberty" 
was written, the doctrine of Individuality had been 
enthusiastically asserted, in a style of vigorous de- 
clamation sometimes reminding one of Fichte, by 
Mr. William Maccall, in a series of writings of which 
the most elaborate is entitled " Elements of In- 



256 GENERAL VIEW OF 

dividualism :" and a remarkable American, Mr. 
Warren, had formed a System of Society, on the 
foundation of the " Sovereignty of the Individual," 
had obtained a number of followers, and had actually 
commenced the formation of a Village Community 
(whether it now exists I know not), which, though 
bearing a superficial resemblance to some of the 
projects of Socialists, is diametrically opposite to 
them in principle, since it recognises no authority 
whatever in Society over the individual, except to 
enforce equal freedom of development for all in- 
dividualities. As the book which bears my name 
claimed no originality for any of its doctrines, and 
was not intended to write their history, the only 
author who had preceded me in their assertion, of 
whom I thought it appropriate to say anything, was 
Humboldt, who furnished the motto to the work ; 
although in one passage I borrowed from the 
Warrenites their phrase, the sovereignty of the in- 
dividual. It is hardly necessary here to remark that 
there are abundant differences in detail, between the 
conception of the doctrine by any of the predecessors I 
have mentioned, and that set forth in the book. 

The political circumstances of the time induced me, 
shortly after, to complete and publish a pamphlet 
("Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform"), part of 
which had been written some years previously, on 
the occasion of one of the abortive Reform Bills, and 






THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFK 257 

had at the time been approved and revised by her, 
Its principal features were, hostility to the Ballot (a 
change of opinion in both of us, in which she rather 
preceded me), and a claim of representation for 
minorities ; not, however, at that time going beyond 
the cumulative vote proposed by Mr. Garth Marshall. 
In finishing the pamphlet for publication, with a view 
to the discussions on the Reform Bill of Lord Derby's 
and Mr. Disraeli's government in 1859, I added a 
third feature, a plurality of votes, to be given, not to 
property, but to proved superiority of education. 
This recommended itself to me as a means of re- 
conciling the irresistible claim of every man or 
woman to be consulted, and to be allowed a voice, in 
the regulation of affairs which vitally concern them, 
with the superiority of weight justly due to 
opinions grounded on superiority of knowledge. 
The suggestion, however, was one which I had never 
discussed with my almost infallible counsellor, and I 
have no evidence that she would have concurred in 
it. As far as I have been able to observe, it has 
found favour with nobody ; all who desire any sort 
of inequality in the electoral vote, desiring it in 
favour of property and not of intelligence or know- 
ledge. If it ever overcomes the strong feeling which 
exists against it, this will only be after the establish- 
ment of a systematic National Education by which 
the various grades of politically valuable acquirement 



258 GENERAL VIEW OF 

may be accurately defined and authenticated. 
Without this it will always remain liable to strong, 
possibly conclusive, objections; and with this, it 
would perhaps not be needed. 

It was soon after the publication of " Thoughts on 
Parliamentary Reform," that I became acquainted 
with Mr. Hare's admirable system of Personal 
Representation, which, in its present shape, w r as then 
for the first time published. I saw in this great 
practical and philosophical idea, the greatest im- 
provement of which the system of representative 
government is susceptible ; an improvement which, 
in the most felicitous manner, exactly meets and 
cures the grand, and what before seemed the inherent, 
delect of the representative system ; that of giving 
to a numerical majority all power, instead of only a 
power proportional to its numbers, and enabling the 
strongest party to exclude all weaker parties from 
making their opinions heard in the assembly of the 
nation, except through such opportunity as may be 
given to them by the accidentally unequal distribu- 
tion of opinions in different localities. To these 
great evils nothing more than very imperfect 
palliations had seemed possible ; but Mr. Hares 
system affords a radical cure. This great discovery, 
for it is no less, in the political art, inspired me, as I 
believe it has inspired all thoughtful persons who 
have adopted it, with new and more sanguine hopes 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 259 

respecting the prospects of human society ; by freeing 
the form of political institutions towards which the 
whole civilized world is manifestly and irresistibly 
tending, from the chief part of what seemed to 
qualify, or render doubtful, its ultimate benefits. 
Minorities, so long as they remain minorities, are, 
and ought to be, outvoted ; but under arrangements 
which enable any assemblage of voters, amounting to 
a certain number, to place in the legislature a repre- 
sentative of its own choice, minorities cannot be 
suppressed. Independent opinions will force their 
way into the council of the nation and make them- 
selves heard there, a thing which often cannot happen 
in the existing forms of representative democracy ; 
and the legislature, instead of bein.9; weeded of indi- 
vidua! peculiarities and entirely made up of men who 
simply represent the creed of great political or religious 
parties, will comprise a large proportion of the most 
eminent individual minds in the country, placed there, 
without reference to party, by voters who appreciate 
their individual eminence. I can understand that 
persons, otherwise intelligent, should, for want of 
sufficient examination, be repelled from Mr. Hare's 
plan by what they think the complex nature of its 
machinery. But any one who does not feel the want 
which the scheme is intended to supply ; any one 
who throws it over as a mere theoretical subtlety or 
crotchet, tending to no valuable purpose, and un- 

s 2 



260 GENERAL VIEW OF 

worthy of the attention of practical men, may he 
pronounced an incompetent statesman, unequal to the 
politics of the future. I mean, unless he is a minister 
or aspires to become one : for we are quite accustomed 
to a minister continuing to profess unqualified hos- 
tility to an improvement almost to the very day when 
his conscience, or his interest, induces him to take it 
up as a public measure, and carry it. 

Had I met with Mr. Hare's system before the 
publication of my pamphlet, I should have given an 
account of it there. Not having done so, I wrote an 
article in Fraser's Magazine (reprinted in my mis- 
cellaneous writings) principally for that purpose, 
though I included in it, along with Mr. Hare's 
book, a review of two other productions on the ques- 
tion of the day ; one of them a pamphlet by my early 
friend, Mr. John Austin, who had in his old age 
become an enemy to all further Parliamentary 
reform ; the other an able and vigorous, though par- 
tially erroneous work by Mr. Lorimer. 

In the course of the same summer I fulfilled a duty 
particularly incumbent upon me, that of helping (by 
an article in the Edinburgh Review) to make known 
Mr. Bain's profound treatise on the Mind, just then 
completed by the publication of its second volume. 
And I carried through the press a selection of my 
minor writings, forming; the first two volumes of 
" Dissertations and Discussions." The selection had 






THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 261 

been made during my wife's lifetime, but the revision, 
in concert with her, with a view to republication, had 
been barely commenced ; and when I had no longei 
the guidance of her judgment I despaired of pur- 
suing it further, and republished the papers as they 
were, with the exception of striking out such passages 
as were no longer in accordance with my opinions. 
My literary work of the year was terminated with an 
essay in Fraser's Magazine, (afterwards republished 
in the third volume of " Dissertations and Dis- 
cussions,") entitled " A Few Words on Non-inter- 
vention." I was prompted to write this paper by a 
desire, while vindicating England from the imputa- 
tions commonly brought against her on the Conti- 
nent, of a peculiar selfishness in matters cf foreign 
policy, to warn Englishmen of the colour given to 
this imputation by the low tone in which English 
statesmen are accustomed to speak of English policy 
as concerned only with English interests, and by the 
conduct of Lord Palmerston at that particular time 
in opposing the Suez Canal : and I took the oppor- 
tunity of expressing ideas which had long been in 
my mind (some of them generated by my Indian 
experience, and others by the international questions 
which then greatly occupied the European public), 
respecting the true principles of international mora- 
lity, and the legitimate modifications made in it by 
difference of times and circumstances ; a subject I had 



262 GENERAL VIEW OF 

already, to some extent, discussed in the Vindication 
of the French Provisional Government of 1848 
against the attacks of Lord Brougham and others, 
which I published at the time in the Westminster 
Review, and which is reprinted in the " Disser- 
tations." 

I had now settled, as I believed, for the remainder 
of my existence into a purely literary life; if that can 
be called literary which continued to be occupied in 
a pre-eminent degree with politics, and not merely 
with theoretical, but practical politics, although a 
great part of the year was spent at a distance of 
many hundred miles from the chief seat of the 
politics of my own country, to which, and primarily 
for which, I wrote. But, in truth, the modern 
facilities of communication have not only removed all 
the disadvantages, to a political writer in tolerably 
easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of 
political action, but have converted them into ad- 
vantages. The immediate and regular receipt of 
newspapers and periodicals keeps him au courant of 
even the most temporary politics, and gives him a much 
more correct view of the state and progress of opinion 
than he could acquire by personal contact with indi- 
viduals : for every one's social intercourse is more or 
less limited to particular sets or classes, whose 
impressions and no others reach him through that 
channel ; and experience has taught me that those 



THE KEMAINDEE, OF MY LIFE. 263 

who give their time to the absorbing claims of what 
is called society, not having leisure to keep up a/ 
large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain 
much more ignorant of the general state either of the 
public mind, or of the active and instructed part/of 
it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need oe. 
There are, no doubt, disadvantages in too kmg a 
separation from one s country — in not occasionally 
renewing one's impressions of the light in which men 
and things appear when seen from a position in the 
midst of them ; but the deliberate judgment formed 
at a distance, and undisturbed by inequalities of 
perspective, is the most to be depended on, even for 
application to practice. Alternating between the two 
positions, I combined the advantages of both. And, 
though the inspirer of my best thoughts was no 
longer with me, I was not alone : she had left a 

daughter, my step-daughter, * * * 

* • * ft ft ft 

* * * whose ever growing and 

ripening talents from that day to this have been 

devoted to the same great purposes. * * 

* ft * * «& -::- 

Surely no one ever before was so fortunate, as, after 
such a loss as mine, to draw another prize in the 
lottery of life. * * * • * 

* * Whoever, either now or hereafter, 
may think of me and of the work I have done, must 



264 CONSIDERATIONS ON 

never forget that it is the product not of ene intellect 

and conscience, but of three. * * * 

* # * * & * 

* « * # * # * 

The work of the years 1860 and 1861 consisted 
chiefly of two treatises, only one of which was in- 
tended for immediate publication. This was the 
" Considerations on Representative Government ;" a 
connected exposition of what, by the thoughts of 
many years, I had come to regard as the best form 
of a popular constitution. Along with as much of the 
general theory of government as is necessary to sup- 
port this particular portion of its practice, the 
volume contains my matured views of the principal 
questions which occupy the present age, within the 
province of purely organic institutions, and raises, by 
anticipation, some other questions to which growing 
necessities will sooner or later compel the attention 
both of theoretical and of practical politicians. The 
chief of these last, is the distinction between the 
function of making laws, for which a numerous 
popular assembly is radically unfit, and that of 
getting good laws made, which is its proper duty 
and cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled by any other 
authority : and the consequent need of a Legisla- 
tive Commission, as a permanent part of the con- 
stitution of a free country; consisting of a small 
number of highly trained political minds, on whoi 



REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT. 265 

when Parliament has determined that a law shall 
be made, the task of making it should be devolved ; 
Parliament retaining the power of passing or re- 
jecting the bill when drawn up, but not of altering 
it otherwise than by sending proposed amendments 
to be dealt with by the Commission. The question 
here raised respecting the most important of all 
public functions, that of legislation, is a particular 
case of the great problem of modern political organi- 
zation, stated, I believe, for the first time in its full 
extent by Bentham, though in my opinion not 
alw r ays satisfactorily resolved by him ; the com- 
bination of complete popular control over public 
affairs, with the greatest attainable perfection of 
skilled agency. 

The other treatise written at this time is the one 
which was published some years later * under the 
title of "The Subjection of Women." It was written 
* * * * that there might, in 

any event, be in existence a written exposition of 
my opinions on that great question, as full and con- 
clusive as I could make it. The intention was to 
keep this among other unpublished papers, im- 
proving it from time to time if I was able, and to 
publish it at the time when it should seem likely 
to be most usefuL As ultimately published 



* In 1869. 



26G THE CIVIL WAR 

tt tt ft * * „ « « 

in what was of my own composition, all that is most 
striking and profound belongs to my wife ; coming 
from the fund of thought which had been made 
common to us both, by our innumerable conversa- 
tions and discussions on a topic which filled so large 
a place in our minds. 

Soon after this time I took from their repository 
a portion of the unpublished papers which I had 
written during the last years of our married life, 
and shaped them, with some additional matter, into 
the little work entitled " Utilitarianism ;" which was 
first published, in three parts, in successive numbers 
of Fraser's Magazine, and afterwards reprinted in a 
volume. 

Before this, however, the state of public affairs 
had become extremely critical, by the commence- 
ment of the American civil war. My strongest 
feelings were engaged in this struggle, which, I felt 
from the beginning, was destined to be a turning 
point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs 
for an indefinite duration. Having been a deeply 
interested observer of the slavery quarrel in 
America, during the many years that preceded the 
open breach, I knew that it was in all its stages 
an aggressive enterprise of the slave-owners to 
extend the territory of slavery ; under the com- 
bined influences of pecuniary interest, domineering 



IN AMEBIC A. 267 

temper, and the fanaticism of a class for its class 
privileges, influences so fully and powerfully de- 
picted in the admirable work of my friend Professor 
Cairn es, " The Slave Power." Their success, if they 
succeeded, would be a victory of the powers of evil 
which would give courage to the enemies of progress 
and damp the spirits of its friends all over the 
civilized world, while it would create a formidable 
military power, grounded on the worst and most 
anti-social form of the tyranny of men over men, and, 
by destroying for a long time the prestige of the 
great democratic republic, would give to all the privi- 
leged classes of Europe a false confidence, probably 
only to be extinguished in blood. On the other 
hand, if the spirit of the North was sufficiently 
roused to carry the war to a successful termina- 
tion, and if that termination did not come too soon 
and too easily, I foresaw, from the laws of human 
nature, and the experience of revolutions, that when 
it did come it would in all probability be thorough : 
that the bulk of the Northern population, whose 
conscience had as yet been awakened only to the 
point of resisting the further extension of slavery, 
but whose fidelity to the Constitution of the United 
States made them disapprove of any attempt by the 
Federal Government to interfere with slavery in the 
States where it already existed, would acquire feelings 
of another kind when the Constitution had been 



268 THE CIVIL WAR 

shaken off by armed rebellion, would determine to 
have done for ever with the accursed thing, and 
would join their banner with that of the noble body 
of Abolitionists, of whom Garrison was the courageous 
and single-minded apostle, Wendell Phillips the elo- 
quent orator, and John Brown the voluntary martyr.* 
Then, too, the whole mind of the United States 
would be let loose from its bonds, no longer cor- 
rupted by the supposed necessity of apologizing to 
foreigners for the most flagrant of all possible viola- 
tions of the free principles of their Constitution ; 
while the tendency of a fixed state of society to 
stereotype a set of national opinions would be at least 
temporarily checked, and the national mind would 
become more open to the recognition of whatever 
was bad in either the institutions or the customs of 
the people. These hopes, so far as related to slavery, 
have been completely, and in other respects are in 
course of being progressively realized. Foreseeing 
from the first this double set of consequences from 
the success or failure of the rebellion, it may be 
imagined with what feelings I contemplated the 
rush of nearly the whole upper and middle classes 
of my own country, even those who passed for 
Liberals, into a furious pro-Southern partisanship : 



* The saying of this true hero, after his capture, that he was worth 
more for hanging than for any other purpose, reminds one, by ita 
combination of wit, wisdom, and self-devotion, of Sir Thomas More. 



IN AMERICA. 269 

the working classes, and some of the literary and 
scientific men, being almost the sole exceptions to 
the general frenzy. I never before felt so keenly 
how little permanent improvement had reached the 
minds of our influential classes, and of what small 
value were the Liberal opinions they had got into 
the habit of professing. None of the Continental 
Liberals committed the same frightful mistake. But 
the generation which had extorted negro emancipa- 
tion from our West India planters had passed away ; 
another had succeeded which had not learnt by 
many years of discussion and exposure to feel 
strongly the enormities of slavery ; and the in- 
attention habitual with Englishmen to whatever is 
going on in the world outside their own island, 
made them profoundly ignorant of all the ante- 
cedents of the struggle, insomuch that it was not 
generally believed in England, for the first year or 
two of the war, that the quarrel was one of slavery. 
There were men of high principle and unquestion- 
able liberality of opinion, who thought it a dispute 
about tariffs, or assimilated it to the cases in which 
they were accustomed to sympathize, of a people 
straggling for independence. 

It was my obvious duty to be one of the small 
minority who protested against this perverted state 
of public opinion. I was not the first to protest. 
It ought to be remembered to the honour of Mr. 



270 THE CIVIL WAR 

Hughes and of Mr. Ludlow, that they? by wittings 
published at the very beginning of the struggle, 
began the protestation. Mr. Bright followed in one 
of the most powerful of his speeches, followed by 
others not less striking. I was on the point of 
adding my word to theirs, when there occurred, 
towards the end of 1861, the seizure of the Southern 
envoys on board a British vessel, by an officer of the 
United States. Even English forgetfulness has not 
yet had time to lose all remembrance of the explosion 
of feeling in England which then burst forth, the 
expectation, which prevailed for some- weeks, of war 
with the United States, and the warlike preparations 
actually commenced on this side. While this state 
of things lasted, there was no chance of a hearing 
for anything favourable to the American cause ; and, 
moreover, I agreed with those who thought the act un- 
justifiable, and such as to require that England should 
demand its disavowal. When the disavowal came, and 
the alarm of war was over, I wrote, in January, 1862, 
the paper, in Frasers Magazine, entitled " The Contest 
in America." * * * * 

* * * Written and published 

when it was, this paper helped to encourage those 
Liberals who had felt overborne by the tide of 
illiberal opinion, and to form in favour of the good 
cause a nucleus of opinion which increased gradually, 
and, after the success of the North began to seem 



IN AMERICA. 271 

probable, rapidly. When we returned from our 
journey I wrote a second article, a review of Pro- 
fessor Cairnes' book, published in the Westminster 
Review. England is paying the penalty, in many 
uncomfortable ways, of the durable resentment 
which her ruling classes stirred up in the United 
States by their ostentatious wishes for the ruin of 
America as a nation : they have reason to be thankful, 
that a few, if only a few, known writers and speakers, 
standing firm|y by the Americans in the time of their 
greatest difficulty, effected a partial diversion of these 
bitter feelings, and made Great Britain not altogether 
odious to the Americans. 

This duty having been performed, my principal 
occupation for the next two years was on subjects not 
political. The publication of Mr. Austins Lectures 
on Jurisprudence after his decease, gave me an oppor- 
tunity of paying a deserved tribute to his memory, and 
at the same time expressing some thoughts on a sub- 
ject on which, in my old days of Benthamism, I had 
bestowed much study. But the chief product of those 
years was the Examination of Sir William Hamilton's 
Philosophy. His Lectures, j3ublished in 1860 and 
1861, I had read towards the end of the latter year, 
with a half-formed intention of giving an account of 
tliem in a Be view, but I soon found that this would 
be idle, and that justice could not be done to the 
subject in less than a volume. I had then to con- 



272 EXAMINATION OF 

sider whether it would be advisable tlM I myself 
should attempt such a performance. On considera- 
tion, there seemed to be strong reasons for doing so. 
I was greatly disappointed with the Lectures. I 
read them, certainly, with no prejudice against Sir 
William Hamilton. I had up to that time deferred 
the study of his Notes to Reid on account of their 
unfinished state, but I had not neglected his " Discus- 
sions in Philosophy ;" and though I knew that his 
general mode of treating the facts of mental philosophy 
differed from that of which I most approved, yet his 
vigorous polemic against the later Transcendent alists, 
and his strenuous assertion of some important princi- 
ples, especially the Relativity of human knowledge, 
gave me many points of sympathy with his opinions, 
and made me think that genuine psychology had con- 
siderably more to gain than to lose by his authority 
and reputation. His Lectures and the Dissertations 
on Reid dispelled this illusion : and even the Discus- 
sions, read by the light which these throw on them, 
lose much of their value. I found that the points of 
apparent agreement between his opinions and mine 
were more verbal than real ; that the important 
philosophical principles which I had thought he 
recognised, were so explained away by him as to 
mean little or nothing, or were continually lost 
sight of, and doctrines entirely inconsistent with 
them were taught in nearly every part of his philo- 



sie william Hamilton's philosophy. 273 

sopliical writings. My estimation of him was there- 
fore so far altered, that instead of regarding him as 
occupying a kind of intermediate position between 
the two rival philosophies, holding some of the 
principles of both, and supplying to both powerful 
weapons of attack and defence, I now looked upon 
him as one of the pillars, and in this country from his 
high philosophical reputation the chief pillar, of that 
one of the two which seemed to me to be erroneous. 

Now, the difference between these two schools of 
philosophy, that of Intuition, and that of Experience 
and Association, is not a mere matter of abstract 
speculation ; it is full of practical consequences, and 
lies at the foundation of all the greatest differences 
of practical opinion in an age of progress. The 
practical reformer has continually to demand that 
changes be made in things which are supported by 
powerful and widely-spread feelings, or to question 
the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of esta- 
blished facts ; and it is oft^n an indispensable part 
of his argument to show, how those powerful feelings 
had their origin, and how those facts came to seem 
necessary and indefeasible. There is therefore a 
natural hostility between him and a philosophy 
which discourages the explanation of feelings and 
moral facts by circumstances and association, and 
prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human 
nature ; a philosophy which is addicted to holding 

T 



274 EXAMINATION Otf 

Up favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and 
deems intuition to be the voice of Nature and of 
God, speaking with an authority higher than that of 
our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the 
prevailing tendency to regard all the marked dis- 
tinctions of human character as innate, and in the 
main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs 
that by far the greater part of those differences, 
whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are 
such as not only might but naturally would be pro- 
duced by differences in circumstances, is one of the 
chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great 
social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling 
blocks to human improvement. This tendency lias 
its source in the intuitional metaphysics which 
characterized the reaction of the nineteenth century 
against the eighteenth, and it is a tendency so 
agreeable to human indolence, as well as to con- 
servative interests generally, that unless attacked at 
the very root, it is sure to be carried to even a 
greater length than is really justified by the more 
moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy. That 
philosophy, not always in its moderate forms, had 
ruled the thought of Europe for the greater part 
of a century. My fathers Analysis of the Mind, 
my own Logic, and Professor Bain's groat treatise, 
had attempted to re-introduce a bettor mode 
philosophizing, latterly with quite as much succ 






sir william Hamilton's philosophy. 275 

could be expected ; but I had for some time felt that 
the mere contrast of the two philosophies was not 
enough, that there ought to be a hand-to-hand fight 
between them, that controversial as well as exposi- 
tory writings were needed, and that the time was 
i come when such controversy would be useful. Con 
sidering then the writings and fame of Sir W. 
Hamilton as the great fortress of the intuitional 
philosophy in this country, a fortress the more formi- 
dable from the imposing character, and the in many 
res] great personal merits and mental endow- 

ment-, of the man, I thought it might be a real 
i to philosophy to attempt a thorough exami- 
nation of all his in** t important doctrines, and an 
of his general claims to eminence as a 
philosopher, and I was confirmed in this resolution 
by observing that in the writings of at least one, and 
him one of the ablest, of Sir W. Hamilton's fol- 
lowers, hi liar doctrines were made the justifi- 
cation of a view of religion which I hold to be 
profoundly immoral — that it is our duty to bow down 
in worship before a Being whose moral attributes are 
nned to be unknowable by us, and to be perhaps 
bremely different from those which, when we are 
speaking of our fellow creatures, we call by the same, 
names 

As I advanced in my task, the damage to Sir W. 
Hamilton's reputation became greater than I at first 

T 2 



276 EXAMINATION OF 

expected, through the almost incredible multitude of 
inconsistencies which showed themselves on com- 
paring different passages with one another. It was 
my business, however, to show things exactly as 
they were, and I did not flinch from it. I endea- 
voured always to treat the philosopher whom I 
criticised with the most scrupulous fairness ; and I 
knew that he had abundance of disciples and admirers 
to correct me if I ever unintentionally did him 
injustice. Many of them accordingly have answered 
me, more or less elaborately ; and they have pointed 
out oversights and misunderstandings, though few in 
number, and mostly very unimportant in substance. 
Such of those as had (to my knowledge) been pointed 
out before the publication of the latest edition (at 
present the third) have been corrected there, and the 
remainder of the criticisms have been, as far as 
seemed necessary, replied to. On the whole, the 
book has done its work : it has shown the weak side 
of Sir WiDiam Hamilton, and has reduced his too 
great philosophical reputation within more moderate 
bounds ; and by seme of its discussions, as well as 
by two expository chapters, on the notions of Matter 
and of Mind, it has perhaps thrown additional light 
on some of the disputed questions hi the domain of 
psychology and metaphysics. 

After the completion of the book on Hamilton. I 
applied myself to a task which a variety of reasons 



sir william Hamilton's philosophy. 277 

seemed to render specially incumbent upon me ; that 
of giving an account, and forming an estimate, of the 
doctrines of August e Comte. I had contributed 
more than any one else to make his speculations 
known in England, and, in consequence chiefly of 
what I had said of him in my Logic, he had readers 
and admirers among thoughtful men on this side of 
the Channel at a time when his name had not yet 
in France emerged from obscurity. So unknown 
and unappreciated was he at the time when my 
Logic was written and published, that to criticise 
his weak points might well appear superfluous, while 
it was a duty to give as much publicity as one could 
to the important contributions he had made to 
philosophic thought. At the time, however, at 
which I have now arrived, this state of affairs had 
entirely changed. His name, at least, was known 
almost universally, and the general character of his 
doctrines very widely. He had taken his place in 
the estimation both of friends and opponents, as one 
of the conspicuous figures in the thought of the age. 
The better parts of his speculations had made great 
progress in working their way into those minds, 
which, by their previous culture and tendencies, were 
fitted to receive them : under cover of those better 
parts those of a worse character, greatly developed 
and added to in his later writings, had also made 
some way, having obtained active and enthusiastic 



278 GENERAL VIEW OP 

adherents, some of them of no inconsiderable per- 
sonal merit, in England, France, and other countries. 
These causes not only made it desirable that some 
one should undertake the task of sifting what is 
good from what is bad in M. Comte's speculations, 
but seemed to impose on myself in particular a 
special obligation to make the attempt. This I 
accordingly did in two essays, published in suc- 
cessive numbers of the Westminster Review, and 
reprinted in a small volume under the title " August e 
Comte and Positivism. " 

The writings which I have now mentioned, toge- 
ther with a small number of papers in periodicals 
which I have not deemed worth preserving, were 
the whole of the products of my activity as a writer 
during the years from 1859 to 1865. In the early 
part of the last -mentioned year, in compliance with 
a wish frequently expressed to me by working men, 
I published cheap People's Editions of those of my 
writings which seemed the most likely to find 
readers among the working classes ; viz., Principles 
of Political Economy, Liberty, and Representative 
Government. This was a considerable sacrifice of i 
pecuniary interest, especially as I resigned all idea 
of deriving profit from the cheap editions, and after 
ascertaining from my publishers the lowest price 
which they thought would remunerate them on the 
usual terms of an equal division of profits, I gave up 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 279 

my half share to enable the price to be fixed still 
lower. To the credit of Messrs. Longman they 
fixed, unasked, a certain number of years after 
which the copyright and stereotype plates were to 
revert to me, and a certain number of copies after the 
sale of which I should receive half of any further 
profit. This number of copies (which in the case of 
the Political Economy was 10,000) has for some 
time been exceeded, and the People's Editions have 

•1111 to yield me a small but unexpected pecuniary 
return, though very far from an equivalent for the 
diminution of profit from the library Editions. 

In this summary of my outward life I have now 
arrived at the period at which my tranquil and 
retired existence as a writer of books was to be 
exchanged for the less congenial occupation of a 
member of the House of Commons. The proposal 
made to me early in L865, by some electors of West- 
minster, did not present the idea to me for the first 
time. It was not even the first offer I had received, 
for, more than ten years previous, in consequence ot 
my opinions on the Irish Land Question, Mr. Lucas 

I Mr. Dully, in the name of the popular party in 
Ireland, offered to bringr me into Parliament for an 
Irish county, which they could easily have done: 
but the incompatibility of a seat in Parliament with 
the oifice I then held in the India House, precluded 
even consideration of the proposal. After I had 



280 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

quitted the India House, several of my friends would 
gladly have seen me a member of Parliament ; but 
there seemed no probability that the idea would 
ever take any practical shape. I was convinced 
that no numerous or influential portion of any 
electoral body, really wished to be represented by 
a person of my opinions ; and that one who pos- 
sessed no local connexion or popularity, and who 
did not choose to stand as the mere organ of a 
party, had small chance of being elected anywhere 
unless through the expenditure of money. Now 
it was, and is, my fixed conviction, that a candi- 
date ought not to incur one farthing of expense 
for undertaking a public duty. Such of the lawful 
expenses of an election as have no special reference 
to any particular candidate, ought to be borne as a 
public charge, either by the State or by the 
locality. What has to be done by the supporters 
of each candidate in order to bring' his claims 
properly before the constituency, should be done 
by unpaid agency, or by voluntary subscription. If 
members of the electoral body, or others, are willing 
to subscribe money of their own for the purpose of 
bringing, by lawful means, into Parliament some one 
who they think would be useful there, no one is 
entitled to object : but that the expense, or any 
part of it, should fall on the candidate, is funda- 
mentally wrong; because it amounts in reality to 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 281 

buying his seat. Even on the most favourable sup- 
position as to the mode in which the money is ex- 
pended, there is a legitimate suspicion that any one 
who gives money for leave to undertake a public 
trust, lias other than public ends to promote by it ; 
and (a consideration of the greatest importance) the 
cost of elections, when borne by the candidates, 
deprives the nation of the services, as members of 
Parliament, of all who cannot or will not afford to 
incur a heavy expense. I do not say that, so long 
as there is scarcely a chance for an independent 
candidate to come into Parliament without com- 
plying with tlii^ vicious practice, it must always be 
morally wrong in him to spend money, provided that 
no part of ither directly or indirectly employed 

in corruption. But, to justify it, he ought to be 
very & rtain that he can be of more use to his 
country as a member of Parliament than in any 
other mode which is open to him; and this assurance, 
in my own case, I did not feel. It was by no means 
clear t<> me that I could do more to advance the 
public objects which had a claim on my exertions, 
from the benches of the House of Commons, than 
from the simple position of a writer. I felt, there- 
re, that I ought not to seek election to Parlia- 
ment, much less to expend any money in pro- 
curing it. 

But the conditions of the question were con- 



282 PARLIAMENTARY LITE. 

siderably altered when a body of electors sought 
me out, and spontaneously offered to bring me 
forward as their candidate. If it should appear, on 
explanation, that they persisted in this wish, knowing 
my opinions, and accepting the only conditions on 
which I could conscientiously serve, it was ques- 
tionable whether this was not one of those calls upon 
a member of the community by his fellow-citizens, 
which he was scarcely justified in rejecting. I there- 
fore put their disposition to the proof by one of the 
frankest explanations ever tendered, I should think, 
to an electoral body by a candidate. I wrote, in reply 
to the offer, a letter for publication, saying that I had 
no personal wish to be a member of Parliament, that 
I thought a candidate ought neither to canvass nor 
to incur any expense, and that I could not consent 
to do either. I said further, that if elected, I could 
not undertake to give any of my time and labour to 
their local interests. With respect to general polil i 
I told them without reserve, what I thought on a 
number of important subjects on which they had 
asked my opinion ; and one of these being the 
suffrage, I made known to them, among other thin 
my conviction (as I was bound to do, since I 
intended, if elected, to act on it), that women were 
entitled to representation in Parliament on the same 
terms with men. It was the first time, doubtless, 
that such a doctrine had ever been mentioned to 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 283 

English electors ; and the fact that I was elected 
after proposing it, gave the start to the movement 
which has since become so vigorous, in favour of 
women's suffrage. Nothing, at the time, appeared 
more unlikely than that a candidate (if candidate I 
could be called) whose professions and conduct set so 
completely at defiance all ordinary notions of elec- 
tioneering, should nevertheless ho elected A well- 
known literary man was heard to say that the 
Almighty himself would have no chance of being 
1 on such a programme. I strictly adhered to 
it, neither spending money nor canvassing, nor did I 
take any personal part in the election, until about a 
week pre of nomination, when I 

mded a few public meetings to state my prin- 
ciples and give answ i any questions which the 

electors might exercise their just right of putting to 
me for their own guidance ; answers as plain and 
unreserved as my address. On one subject only, 
my religious opinions, I announced from the 
b -inning that I would answer no questions ; a deter- 
mination which appeared to be completely approved 
by those who attended the meetings. My frank- 
ness on all other subjects on which I was interrogated, 
evidently did me far more good than my answers, 
whatever theymight be, did harm. Among the proofs 
I received of this, one is too remarkable not to be 
recorded. In the pamphlet, " Thoughts on Parlia- 



) 



284 PARLIAMENT ABY LIFE. 

mentary Reform," I had said, rather bluntly, that 
the working classes, though differing from those of 
some other countries, in being ashamed of lying, are 
yet generally liars. This passage some opponent got 
printed in a placard, which was handed to me at a 
meeting, chiefly composed of the working classes, and 
I was asked whether I had written and published it. 
I at once answered "I did." Scarcely were these 
two words out of my mouth, when vehement applause 
resounded through the whole meeting. It was evident 
that the working people were so accustomed to expect 
equivocation and evasion from those who sought their 
suffrages, that when they found, instead of that, a 
direct avowal of what was likely to be disagreeable 
to them, instead of being affronted, they concluded 
at once that this was a person whom they could 
trust. A more striking instance never came under 
my notice of what, I believe, is the experience of 
those who best know the working classes, that the 
most essential of all recommendations to their favour 
is that of complete straightforwardness ; its presence 
outweighs in their minds very strong objections, 
while no amount of other qualities will make amends 
for its apparent absence. The first working man who 
spoke after the incident I have mentioned (it was 
Mr. Odger) said, that the working classes had no 
desire not to be told of their faults ; they wanted 
friends, not flatterers, and felt under obligation to 



PARLIAMENTARY LITE. 285 

any one who told them anything in themselves which 
he sincerely believed to require amendment. And 
to this the meeting heartily responded. 

Had I been defeated in the election, I should still 
have had no reason to regret the contact it had 
brought me into with large bodies of my country- 
men ; which not only gave me much new experience, 
but enabled me to scatter my political opinions more 
widely, and, by making me known in many quarters 
where I had never before been heard of, increased 
the number of my readers, and the presumable influ- 
ence of my writings. These latter effects were of 
course produced in a still greater degree, when, as 
much to my surprise as to that of any one, I was 
returned to Parliament by a majority of some 
hundreds over my Conservative competitor. 

I was a member of the House during the three 
sessions of the Parliament which passed the Reform 
Bill ; during which time Parliament was necessarily 
my main occupation, except during the recess. I 
was a tolerably frequent speaker, sometimes of pre- 
pared speeches, sometimes extemporaneously. But 
my choice of occasions was not such as I should have 
made if my leading object had been Parliamentary 
influence. When I had gained the ear of the House, 
which I did by a successful speech on Mr. Gladstone's 
Reform Bill, the idea I proceeded on was that when 
anything was likely to be as well done, or sufficiently 



286 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

well done, by other people, there was no necessity 
for me to meddle with it. As I, therefore, in general 
reserved myself for work which no others were likely 
to do, a great proportion of my appearances were on 
points on which the bulk of the Liberal party, even 
the advanced portion of it, either were of a different 
opinion from mine, or were comparatively indifferent. 
Several of my speeches, especially one against the 
motion for the abolition of capital punishment, and 
another in favour of resuming the right of seizing 
enemies' goods in neutral vessels, were opposed to 
what then was, and probably still is, regarded as the 
advanced Liberal opinion. My advocacy of women's 
suffrage and of Personal Representation, were at the 
time looked upon by many as whims of my own ; but 
the great progress since made by those opinions, and 
especially the response made from almost all parts of 
the kingdom to the demand for women's suffrage, 
fully justified the timeliness of those movements, 
and have made what was undertaken as a moral and 
social duty, a personal success. Another duty which 
was particularly incumbent on me as one of the metro- 
politan members, was the attempt to obtain a 
Municipal Government for the Metropolis: but 
that subject the indifference of the Hou e of Comm< 
was such that I found hardly any help or supp 
within its walls. On this subject, however, 1 v 
the organ of an active and intelligent body of persona 



PARLIAMENTARY LITE. 287 

outside, with whom, and not with me, the scheme 

originated, and who carried on all the agitation on the 

subject and drew up the Bills. My part was to 

bring in Bills already prepared, and to sustain the 

discussion of them during the short time they were 

allowed to remain before the House ; after having 

taken an active part in the work of a Committee 
jj 
presided over by Mr. Ayrton, which sat through the 

greater part of the session of 18 G6, to take evidence 
on the subject. The very different position in which 
the question now stands (1870) may justly be attri- 
buted to the preparation which went on during those 
years, and which produced but little visible effect at 
tin' time; but all questions on which there are strong 
private im on one side, and only the public 

good on the other, have a similar period of incubation 
to go through. 

The same idea, that the use of my being in Par- 
liament was to do work which others were not able 
or not willing to do, made me think it my duty to 
I come to the front in defence of advanced Liberalism 
- on occasions when the obloquy to be encountered 
was such as most of the advanced Liberals in the 
fi House, preferred not to incur. My first vote in the 
,- House was in support of an amendment in favour of 
Ireland, moved by an Irish member, and for which 
only five English and Scv. tch votes were given, in- 
i eluding my own : the other four were Mr. Bright, Mr. 



288 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

M'Laren, Mr. T. B. Potter, and Mr. Hadfield. And 
the second speech I delivered"' 5 " was on the Bill to 
prolong the suspension of the Habeas Corpus in 
Ireland. In denouncing, on this occasion, the English 
mode of governing Ireland, I did no more than the 
general opinion of England now admits to have been 
just ; but the anger against Fenianism was then in 
all its freshness ; any attack on what Fenians attacked 
was looked upon as an apology for them ; and I was 
so unfavourably received by the House, that more 
than one of my friends advised me (and my own 
judgment agreed with the advice) to wait, before 
speaking again, for the favourable opportunity that 
would be given by the first great debate on the 
Reform Bill. During this silence, many flattered 
themselves that I had turned out a failure, and that 
they should not be troubled with me any more. 
Perhaps their uncomplimentary comments may, by 
the force of reaction, have helped to make my sjoeech 
on the Reform Bill the success it was. My position 
in the House was further improved by a speech in 
which I insisted on the duty of paying off the National 
Debt before our coal supplies are exhausted, and by 

* Tlie first was in answer to Mr. Lowe's reply to Mr. Bright on the 
Cattle Flague Bill, and was thought at the time to have helped to 
rid of a provision in the Government measure which would have g 
to landholders a second indemnity, after they had already been i 
indemnified for the loss of some of their cattle by the increased 
selling price of the remainder. 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 289 

an ironical reply to some of the Tory leaders who had 
quoted against me certain passages of my writings, 
and called me to account for others, especially for one 
in my " Considerations on Representative Govern- 
ment," which said that the Conservative party was, 
by the law of its composition, the stupidest party. 
They gained nothing by drawing attention to the 
passage, which up to that time had not excited any 
notice, but the sobriquet of " the stupid party' 
stuck to them for a considerable time afterwards. 
Having now no longer any apprehension of not being 
listened to, I confined myself, as I have since thought 
too much, to occasions on which my services seemed 
specially needed, and abstained more than enough 
from speaking on the great party questions. With 
the exception of Irish questions, and those which 
concerned the working classes, a single speech on 
Mr. Disraelis Reform Bill was nearly all that I 
contributed to the great decisive debates of the last 
. two of my three sessions. 

I have, however, much satisfaction in looking back 
i to the part I took on the two classes of subjects just 
\ mentioned. With regard to the working classes, the 
chief topic of my speech on Mr. Gladstone's Reform 
Bill was the assertion of their claims to the suffrage. 
A little later, after the resignation of Lord Russell's 
Ministry and the succession of a Tory Government, 
came the attempt of the working classes to hold a 

u 



290 PARLIAMENTARY LIFB. 

meeting in Hyde Park, their exclusion by the police, 
and the breaking down of the park railing by the 
crowd. Though Mr. Beales and the leaders of 
the working men had retired under protest when 
this took place, a scuffle ensued in which many in- 
nocent persons were maltreated by the police, and 
the exasperation of the working men was extreme. 
They showed a determination to make another 
attempt at a meeting in the Park, to which many of 
them would probably have come armed ; the Govern- 
ment made military preparations to resist the attempt, 
and something very serious seemed impending. At 
this crisis I really believe that I was the means of 
preventing much mischief. I had in my place in 
Parliament taken the side of the working men, and 
strongly censured the conduct of the Government. I 
was invited, with several other Radical members, to a 
conference with the leading members of the Council 
of the Reform League; and the task fell chiefly upon 
myself, of persuading them to give up the Hyde Park 
project, and hold their meeting elsewhere. It was 
not Mr. Beales and Colonel Dickson who needed 
persuading ; on the contrary, it was evident that 
these gentlemen had already exerted their influence 
in the same direction, thus far without success. It 
was the working men who held out, and so bent 
were they on their original scheme, that I was obliged 
to have recourse to les. grands moyens. I told them 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 291 

that a proceeding which would certainly produce a 
collision with the military, could only be justifiable 
on two conditions : if the position of affairs had 
become such that a revolution was desirable, and if 
they thought themselves able to accomplish one. To 
this argument, after considerable discussion, they at 
last yielded : and I was able to inform Mr. Walpole 
that their intention was given up. I shall never 
forget the depth of his relief or the w^armth of his 
expressions of gratitude. After the working men 
had conceded so much to me, I felt bound to comply 
with their request that I would attend and speak 
at their meeting at the Agricultural Hall ; the only 
meeting called by the Reform League which I ever 
attended. I had always declined being a member 
of the League, on the avowed ground that I did not 
agree in its programme of manhood suffrage and the 
ballot : from the ballot I dissented entirely ; and I 
could not consent to hoist the flag of manhood 
suffrage, even on the assurance that the exclusion 
of women was not intended to be implied ; since if 
one goes beyond what can be immediately carried, 
and professes to take one's stand on a principle, one 
should go the whole length of the principle. I have 
entered thus particularly into this matter because 
my conduct on this occasion gave great displeasure 
to the Tory and Tory-Liberal press, who have charged 
me ever since with having shown myself, in the trials 

U 2 



292 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

of j ublic life, intemperate and passionate. I do not 
know what they expected from me ; but they had 
reason to be thankful to me if they knew from what 
I had, in all probability, preserved them. And I do 
not believe it could have been done, at that particular 
juncture, by any one else. No other person, I believe, 
had at that moment the necessary influence for re- 
straining the working classes, except Mr. Gladstone 
and Mr. Bright, neither of whom was available : Mr. 
Gladstone for obvious reasons; Mr. Bright because he 
was out of town. 

When, some time later, the Tory Government 
brought in a Bill to prevent public meetings in the 
Parks, I not only spoke strongly in opposition to it, 
but formed one of a number of advanced Liberals, 
who, aided by the very late period of the session, 
succeeded in defeating the Bill by what is called 
talking it out. It has not since been renewed. 

On Irish affairs also I felt bound to take a decided 
part. I was one of the foremost in the deputa- 
tion of members of Parliament who prevailed on Lord 
Derby to spare the life of the condemned Fenian 
insurgent, General Burke. The Church question was 
so vigorously handled by the leaders of the party, in 
the session of 1868, as to require no more from me 
than an emphatic adhesion : but the land question was 
by no means in so advanced a position : the supersti- 
tions of landlordism had up to that time been little 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 293 

challenged, especially in Parliament, and the hack- 
ward state of the question, so far as concerned the 
Parliamentary mind, was evidenced by the extremely 
mild measure brought in by Lord Russell's Govern- 
ment ill 1866, which nevertheless could not be car- 
ried. On that Bill I delivered one of my most 
careful speeches, in which I attempted to lay down 
some of the principles of the subject, in a manner 
calculated less to stimulate friends, than to conciliate 
and convince opponents. The engrossing subject of 
Parliamentary Reform prevented either this Bill, 
or one of a similar character brought in by Lord 
Derby's Government, from being carried through. 
They never got beyond the second reading. Mean- 
while the signs of Irish disaffection had become much 
more decided ; the demand for complete separation 
between the two countries had assumed a menacing 
aspect, and there were few who did not feel that if 
there was still any chance of reconciling Ireland to 
the British connexion, it could only be by the adop- 
tion of much more thorough reforms in the territorial 
and social relations of the country, than had yet been 
contemplated. The time seemed to me to have come 
when it would be useful to speak out my whole 
mind ; and the result was my pamphlet " England 
and Ireland/ 7 which was written in the winter of 
1867, and published shortly before the commence- 
ment of the session of 1868. The leading features of 



294 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

the pamphlet were, on the one hand, an argument to 
show the undesirableness, for Ireland as well as foi 
England, of separation between the countries, and 
on the other, a proposal for settling the land ques- 
tion by giving to the existing tenants a permanent 
tenure, at a fixed rent, to be assessed after due 
inquiry by the State. 

The pamphlet was not popular, except in Ireland, 
as I did not expect it to be. But, if no measure 
short of that which I proposed would do full justice 
to Ireland, or afford a prospect of conciliating the 
mass of the Irish people, the duty of proposing it 
was imperative ; while if, on the other hand, there was 
any intermediate course which had a claim to a trial, 
I well knew that to propose something which would 
be called extreme, was the true way not to impede 
but to facilitate a more moderate experiment. It is 
most improbable that a measure conceding so much to 
the tenantry as Mr. Gladstones Irish Land Bill, 
would have been proposed by a Government, or 
could have been carried through Parliament, unl 
the British public had been led to perceive that a 
case might be made, and perhaps a party formed, for 
a measure considerably stronger. It is the character 
of the British people, or at least of the higher and 
middle classes who pass muster for the British 
people, that to induce them to approve of any 
change, it is necessary that they should look upon 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 295 

1 it as a middle course : they think every proposal 
extreme and violent unless they hear of some other 
proposal going still farther, upon which their anti- 
pathy to extreme views may discharge itself. So it 
proved in the prefeent instance ; my proposal was 
condemned, but any scheme for Irish Land reform, 
short of mine, came to be thought moderate by com- 
parison. I may observe that the attacks made on 
my plan usually gave a very incorrect idea of its 
nature. It was usually discussed as a proposal that 
the State should buy up the land and become the 
universal landlord ; though in fact it only offered to 
a individual landlord this as an alternative, if 

1 he liked better to Bell his i than to retain it on 

the new conditions ; and I fully anticipated that 
most landlords would continue to prefer the position 
of landowners to that of Government annuitants, and 
would retain their existing relation to their tenants, 
often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on 
which the compensation to be given them by Govern- 
ment would have been based. This and many other 
explanations I gave in a speech on Ireland, in the 

] debate on Mr. Maguire's resolution, early in the 

! session of 18G8. A corrected report of this speech, 
together with my speech on Mr. Fortescue's Bill, 
has been published (not by me, but with my per- 
mission) in Ireland. 

Another public duty, of a most serious kind, it 



296 PARLIAMENTARY LITE. 

was my lot to have to perform, both in and out of 
Parliament, during these years. A disturbance in 
Jamaica, provoked in the first instance by injustice, 
and exaggerated by rage and panic into a pre- 
meditated rebellion, had been the motive or excuse 
for taking hundreds of innocent lives by military 
violence, or by sentence of what were called courts- 
martial, continuing for weeks after the brief distur- 
bance had been put down ; with many added atrocities 
of destruction of property, flogging women as well as 
men, and a general display of the brutal recklessness 
which usually prevails when fire and sword are let 
loose. The perpetrators of those deeds were defended 
and applauded in England by the same kind of 
people who had so long upheld negro slavery : and it 
seemed at first as if the British nation was about to 
incur the disgrace of letting pass without even a 
protest, excesses of authority as revolting as any of 
those for which, when perpetrated by the instruments 
of other Governments, Englishmen can hardly find 
terms sufficient to express their abhorrence. After 
a short time, however, an indignant feeling was 
roused : a voluntary Association formed itself under 
the name of the Jamaica Committee, to take such 
deliberation and action as the case might admit of, 
and adhesions poured in from all parts of the country, 
I was abroad at the time, but I sent in my name to 
the Committee as soon as I heard of it, and took an 
active part in the proceedings from the time of my 



PARLIAMENTABY LIFE; 297 

1 

j return. There was much more at stake than only 
justice to the Negroes, imperative as was that con- 
! sideration. The question was, whether the British 
i dependencies, and eventually, perhaps, Great Britain 
i itself, were to be under the government of law, or of 
i military licence ; whether the lives and persons of 
I British subjects are at the mercy of any two or three 
S officers however raw and inexperienced or reckless 
> and brutal, whom a panic-stricken Governor, or other 
functionary, may assume the right to constitute into 
a so-called court-martial. This question could only 
be decided by an appeal to the tribunals ; and such 
an appeal the Committee determined to make. Their 
determination led to a change in the chairmanship of 
the Committee, as the chairman, Mr. Charles Buxton, 
thought it not unjust indeed, but inexpedient, to 
prosecute Governor Eyre and his principal sub- 
ordinates in a criminal court : but a numerously 
attended general meeting of the Association having 
decided this point against him, Mr. Buxton withdrew 
from the Committee, though continuing to work in 
the cause, and I was, quite unexpectedly on my own 
part, proposed and elected chairman. It became, in 
consequence, my duty to represent the Committee in 
the House of Commons, sometimes by putting questions 
to the Government, sometimes as the recipient of ques- 
tions, more or less provocative, addressed by individual 
members to myself ; but especially as speaker in the 
important debate originated in the session of 1866, by 



293 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

Mr. Buxton : and the speech I then delivered is that' 
which I should probably select as the best of my^ 
speeches in Parliament.* For more than two years 
we carried on the combat, trying every avenue legally 
open to us, to the Courts of Criminal Justice. A 
bench of magistrates in one of the most Tory counties j 
in England dismissed our case : we were more success- 
ful before the magistrates at Bow Street ; which 
gave an opportunity to the Lord Chief Justice of the 
Queen's Bench, Sir Alexander Cockburn, for deliver- 
ing his colebrated charge, which settled the law of 
the question in favour of liberty, as far as it is in the 
power of a judge's charge to settle it. There, how- 
ever, our success ended, for the Old Bailey Grand 
Jury by throwing out our Bill prevented the case 
from coming to trial. It was clear that to bring 
English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court y 
for abuses of power committed against negroes and 
!nulattoes was not a popular proceeding with the 
English middle classes. We had, however, redeemed, 
so far as lay in us, the character of our country, by 
showing that there was at any rate a body of 
persons determined to use all the means which the 
law afforded to obtain justice for the injured. We 



* Among the most active members of the Committee were Mr. P. A. 
Taylor, M.P., always faithful and energetic in every assertion of 
Mie principles of liberty ; Mr. Gold win Smith, Mr. Frederick Harrison, 
Mr. Slack, Mr. Chamerovzow, Mr. Shaen, and Mr. Chesson, the 
Honorary Secretary of the Association. 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 299 

■'had elicited from the highest criminal judge in the 
\ nation an authoritative declaration that the law was 
what we maintained it to be ; and we had given an 
emphatic warning to those who might be tempted 
to similar guilt hereafter, that, though they might 
escape the actual sentence of a criminal tribunal, 
they were not safe against being put to some trouble 
and expense in order to avoid it. Colonial governors 
and other persons in authority, will have a consider- 
able motive to stop short of such extremities in 

future. 

As a matter of curiosity I kept some specimens 
of the abusive letters, almost all of them anonymous, 
which I received while these proceedings were going 
on. They are evidence of the sympathy felt with the 
brutalities in Jamaica by the brutal part of the popu- 
lation at home. They graduated from coarse jokes, 
verbal and pictorial, up to threats of assassination. 
Among other matters of importance in which I 
took an active part, but which excited little interest 
in the public, two deserve particular mention. I 
joined with several other independent Liberals in 
defeating an Extradition Bill introduced at the 
very end of the session of 1866, and by which, 
though surrender avowedly for political offences was 
not authorized, political refugees, if charged by a 
foreign Government with acts which are necessarily 
incident to all attempts at insurrection, would have 
been surrendered to be dealt with by the criminal 



300 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

courts of the Government against which they had 
rebelled : thus making the British Government an 
accomplice in the vengeance of foreign despotisms. 
The defeat of this proposal led to the appointment 
of a Select Committee (in which I was included), to 
examine and report on the whole subject of Extra- 
dition Treaties ; and the result was, that in the Ex- 
tradition Act which passed through Parliament after 
I had ceased to be a member, opportunity is given 
to any one whose extradition is demanded, of being 
heard before an English court of justice to prove 
that the offence with which he is charged, is really 
political. The cause of European freedom has thus 
been saved from a serious misfortune, and our own 

country from a great iniquity. The other subject to 
be mentioned is the fight kept up by a body of 
advanced Liberals in the session of 1868, on the 
Bribery Bill of Mr. Disraeli's Government, in which 
I took a very active part. I had taken counsel with 
several of those who had applied their minds most 
carefully to the details of the subject — Mr. W. D. 
Christie, Serjeant Pulling, Mr. Chadwick — as well 
as bestowed much thought of my own, for the pur- 
pose of framing such amendments and additional 
clauses as might make the Bill really effective 
against the numerous modes of corruption, direct 
and indirect, which might otherwise, as there was 
much reason to fear, be increased instead of dimi- 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 301 

nished by the Eeform Act. We also aimed at en- 
grafting on the Bill, measures for diminishing the 
mischievous burden of what are called the legitimate 
expenses of elections. Among our many amend- 
ments, was that of Mr. Fawcett for making the 
returning officer's expenses a charge on the rates, 
instead of on the candidates ; another was the pro- 
hibition of paid canvassers, and the limitation of 
paid agents to one for each candidate ; a third was 
the extension of the precautions and penalties 
against bribery, to municipal elections, which are 
well known to be not only a preparatory school for 
bribery at Parliamentary elections, but an habitual 
cover for it. The Conservative Government, how- 
ever, when once they had carried the leading pro- 
vision of their Bill (for which I voted and spoke), 
the transfer of the jurisdiction in elections from the 
House of Commons to the Judges, made a determined 
resistance to all other improvements ; and after one 
of the most important proposals, that of Mr. Fawcett, 
had actually obtained a majority, they summoned 
the strength of their party and threw out the clause 
in a subsequent stage. The Liberal party in the 
House was greatly dishonoured by the conduct of 
many of its members in giving no help whatever 
to this attempt to secure the necessary conditions of 
an honest representation of the people. With their 
large majority in the House they could have carried 



302 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

all the amendments, or better ones if they Lad better 
to propose. But it was late in the session ; members 
were eager to set about their preparations for the 
impending General Election : and while some (such 
as Sir Robert Anstruther) honourably remained at 
their post, though rival candidates were already can- 
vassing their constituency, a much greater number 
placed their electioneering interests before their 
public duty. Many Liberals also looked with in- 
difference on legislation against bribery, thinking 
that it merely diverted public interest from the 
Ballot, which they considered, very mistakenly as I 
expect it will turn out, to be a sufficient, and the only, 
remedy. From these causes our fight, though kept 
up with great vigour for several nights, was wholly 
unsuccessful, and the practices which we sought to 
render more difficult, prevailed more widely than 
ever in the first General Election held under the 
new electoral law. 

In the general debates on Mr. Disraeli's Reform 
Bill, my participation was limited to the one speech 
already mentioned : but I made the Bill an occasion 
for bringing the two greatest improvements which 
remain to be made in Representative Government, 
formally before the House and the nation. One of 
them was Personal, or, as it is called with equal 
propriety, Proportional Representation. I brought 
this under the consideration of the House, by an 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 303 

expository and argumentative speech on Mr. Hare's 
plan ; and subsequently I was active in support of 
the very imperfect substitute for that plan, which, 
in a small number of constituencies, Parliament was 
induced to adopt. This poor makeshift had scarcely 
any recommendation, except that it was a partial 
recognition of the evil which it did so little to 
remedy. As such, however, it was attacked by the 
same fallacies, and required to be defended on the 
same principles, as a really good measure \ and its 
adoption in a few Parliamentary elections, as well 
as the subsequent introduction of what is called the 
Cumulative Vote in the elections for the London 
School Board, have had the good effect of converting 
the equal claim of all electors to a proportional share 
in the representation, from a subject of merely 
speculative discussion, into a question of practical 
politics, much sooner than would otherwise have 
been the case. 

This assertion of my opinions on Personal Repre- 
sentation cannot be credited with any considerable 
or visible amount of practical result. It was other- 
wise with the otl er motion which I made in the 
form of an amendment to the Reform Bill, and 
which was by far the most important, perhaps the 
only really important, public service I performed in 
the capacity of a member of Parliament : a motion 
to strike out the words which were understood to 



304 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

limit the electoral franchise to males, and thereby 
to admit to the suffrage all women who, as house- 
holders or otherwise, possessed the qualification re- 
quired of male electors. For women not to make 
their claim to the suffrage, at the time when the 
elective franchise was being largely extended, w^ould 
have been to abjure the claim altogether ; and a 
movement on the subject was begun in 1866, when 
I presented a petition for the suffrage, signed by a 
considerable number of distinguished women. But 
it was as yet uncertain whether the proposal would 
obtain more than a few stray votes in the House : 
and when, after a debate in which the speakers on 
the contrary side were conspicuous by their feeble- 
ness, the votes recorded in favour of the motion 
amounted to 73 — made up by pairs and tellers to 
above 80 — the surprise was general, and the en- 
couragement great : the greater, too, because one of 
those who voted for the motion was Mr. Bright, a 
fact which could only be attributed to the im- 
pression made on him by the debate, as he had pre- 
viously made no secret of his non-concurrence in the 
proposal. * * * * 

I believe I have mentioned all that is worth 
remembering of my proceedings in the House. But 
their enumeration, even if complete, would give but 
an inadequate idea of my occupations during that 
period, and especially of the time taken up by cor- 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 305 

respondence. For many years before my election to 
Parliament, I had been continually receiving letters 
from strangers, mostly addressed to me as a writer 
on philosophy, and either propounding difficulties or 
communicating thoughts on subjects connected with 
logic or political economy. In common, I suppose, 
with all who are known as political economists, I 
was a recipient of all the shallow theories and 
absurd proposals by which people are perpetually 
endeavouring to show the way to universal wealth 
and happiness by some artful reorganization of the 
currency. When there were signs of sufficient in- 
telligence in the writers to make it worth while 
attempting to put them right, I took the trouble to 
point out their errors, until the growth of my cor- 
respondence made it necessary to dismiss such per- 
sons with very brief answers. Many, however, of 
the communications I received were more worthy of 
attention than these, and in some, over-sights of 
detail were pointed out in my writings, which I was 
thus enabled to correct. Correspondence of this sort 
naturally multiplied with the multiplication of the 
subjects on which I wrote, especially those of a 
metaphysical character. But when I became a member 
of Parliament, I began to receive letters on private 
grievances and on every imaginable subject that 
related to any kind of public affairs, however remote 
from my knowledge or pursuits. It was not my 

x 



306 PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 

constituents in Westminster who laid -this burden 
on me : they kept with remarkable fidelity to the 
understanding on which I had consented to serve. 
I received, indeed, now and then an application from 
some ingenuous youth to procure for him a small 
Government appointment ; but these were few, and 
how simple and ignorant the writers were, was shown 
by the fact that the applications came in about 
equally whichever party was in power. My in- 
variable answer was, that it was contrary to the 
principles on which I was elected to ask favours of 
any Government. But, on the whole, hardly any 
part of the country gave me less trouble than my 
own constituents. The general mass of corre- 
spondence, however, swelled into an oppressive 

burden. * * * * * 

* * * * * * 

* * * * * * * 

■fc ¥r * * * * 

While I remained in Parliament my work as an 
author was unavoidably limited to the recess. During 
that time I wrote (besides the pamphlet on Ireland, 
already mentioned), the Essay on Plato, published in 
the Edinburgh Review, and reprinted in the third 
volume of " Dissertations and Discussions ;" and the 
address which, conformably to custom, I delivered to 
the University of St. Andrew's, whose students had 
done me the honour of electing me to the office of 



PARLIAMENTARY LIFE. 307 

Rector. In this Discourse I gave expression to 
many thoughts and opinions which had been accumu- 
lating in me through life, respecting the various 
studies which belong to a liberal education, their 
uses and influences, and the mode in which they 
should be pursued to render their influences most 
beneficial. The position taken up, vindicating the 
high educational value alike of the old classic and 
the new scientific studies, on even stronger grounds 
than are urged by most of their advocates, and 
insisting that it is only the stupid inefficiency of the 
usual teaching which makes those studies be regarded 
as competitors instead of allies, was, I think, calcu- 
lated, not only to aid and stimulate the improve- 
ment which has happily commenced in the national 
institutions for higher education, but to diffuse juster 
ideas than we often find, even in highly educated men, 
on the conditions of the highest mental cultivation. 

During this period also I commenced (and com- 
pleted soon after I had left Parliament) the per- 
formance of a duty to philosophy and to the memory 
of my father, by preparing and publishing an edition 
of the "Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human 
Mind," with notes bringing up the doctrines of that 
admirable book to the latest improvements in science 
and hi speculation. This was a joint undertaking : 
the psychological notes being furnished in about 
equal proportions by Mr. Bain and myself, while Mr. 



308 GENERAL VIEW OF 

Grote supplied some valuable contributions on points 
in the history of philosophy incidentally raised, and 
Dr. Andrew Findlater supplied the deficiencies in 
the book which had been occasioned by the imperfect 
philological knowledge of the time when it was 
written. Having been originally published at a time 
when the current of metaphysical speculation ran 
in a quite opposite direction to the psychology of 
Experience and Association, the " Analysis" had not 
obtained the amount of immediate success which it 
deserved, though it had made a deep impression on 
many individual minds, and had largely contributed, 
through those minds, to create that more favourable 
atmosphere for the Association Psychology of which 
we now have the benefit. Admirably adapted for a 
class-book of the Experience Metaphysics, it only 
required to be enriched, and hi some cases corrected, 
by the results of more recent labours in the. same 
school of thought, to stand, as it now does, in com- 
pany with Mr. Bain's treatises, at the head of the 
systematic works on Analytic Psychology. 

In the autumn of 1868 the Parliament which 
passed the .Reform Act was dissolved, and at the 
new election for Westminster I was thrown out ; 
not to my surprise, nor, I believe, to that of my 
principal supporters, though in the few days pre- 
ceding the election they had become more sanguine 
than before. That I should not have been elected at 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 309 

all would not have required any explanation ; what 
excites curiosity is that I should have been elected the 
first time, or, having been elected then, should have 
been defeated afterwards. But the efforts made to 
defeat me were far greater on the second occasion 
than on the first. For one thing, the Tory Govern- 
ment was now struggling for existence, and success in 
any contest was of more importance to them. Then, 
too, all persons of Tory feelings were far more em- 
bittered against me individually than on the previous 
occasion ; many who had at first been either favour- 
able or indifferent, were vehemently opposed to my 
re-election. As I Lad shown in my political writings 
that I was aware of the weak points in democratic 
opinions. Borne Conservatives, it seems, had not been 
without hopes of finding me an oj)ponent of demo- 
cracy : as I was able to see the Conservative side 
of the question, they presumed that, like them, I 
could not see any other side. Yet if they had really 
read my writings, they would have known that after 
giving full weight to all that appeared to me well 
grounded in the .arguments against democracy, I 
unhesitatingly decided in its favour, while recom- 
mending that it should be accompanied by such 
institutions as were consistent with its principle and 
calculated to ward off its inconveniences: one of the 
chief of these remedies being Proportional Repre- 
sentation, on which scarcely any of the Conservatives 



310 GENERAL VIEW OF 

gave me any support. Some Tory -expectations 
appear to have been founded on the approbation I 
had expressed of plural voting, under certain con- 
ditions : and it has been surmised that the suggestion 
of this sort made in one of the resolutions which 
Mr. Disraeli introduced into the House preparatory 
to his Reform Bill (a suggestion which meeting with 
no favour he did not press), may have been occa- 
sioned by what I had written on the point : but if 
so, it was forgotten that I had made it an express 
condition that the privilege of a plurality of votes 
should be annexed to education, not to property, and 
even so, had approved of it only on the supposition 
of universal suffrage. How utterly inadmissible such 
plural voting would be under the suffrage given by 
the present Reform Act, is proved, to any who could 
otherwise doubt it, by the very small weight which 
the working classes are found to possess in elections, 
even under the law which gives no more votes to 
any one elector than to any other. 

While I thus was far more obnoxious to the Tory 
interest, and to many Conservative Liberals than I 
had formerly been, the course I pursued in Par? 
liament had by no means been such as to make 
Liberals generally at all enthusiastic in my support. 
It has already been mentioned, how large a pro- 
portion of my prominent appearances had been on 
questions on which I differed from most of the 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 311 

Liberal party, or about which they cared little, and 
how few occasions there had been on which the line 
I took was such as could lead them to attach any 
great value to me as an organ of their opinions. I 
had moreover done things which had excited, in many 
minds, a personal prejudice against me. Many 
were offended by what they called the persecution 
of Mr. Eyre : and still greater offence was taken at 
my sending a subscription to the election expenses 
of Mr. Bradlaugh. Having refused to be at any 
expense for my own election, and having had all its 
expenses defrayed by others, I felt under a peculiar 
obligation to subscribe in my turn where funds were 
deficient for candidates whose election was desirable. 
I accordingly sent subscriptions to nearly all the 
working class candidates, and among others to Mr. 
Bradlaugh. He had the support of the working classes ; 
having heard him speak, I knew him to be a man of 
ability, and he had proved that he was the reverse of a 
demagogue, by placing himself in strong opposition 
to the prevailing opinion of the democratic party on 
two such important subjects as Malthusianism and 
Personal Representation. Men of this sort, who, 
while sharing the democratic feelings of the working 
classes, judged political questions for themselves, and 
had courage to assert their individual convictions 
against popular opposition, were needed, as it seemed 
to me, in Parliament, and I did not think that Mr, 



312 GENERAL VIEW OP 

Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even ^though he 
had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought 
to exclude him. In subscribing, however, to his elec- 
tion, I did what would have been highly imprudent 
if I had been at liberty to consider only the interests 
of my own re-election ; and, as might be expected, 
the utmost possible use, both fair and unfair, was 
made of this act of mine to stir up the electors of 
Westminster against me. To these various causes, 
combined with an unscrupulous use of the usual 
pecuniary and other influences on the side of my 
Tory competitor, while none were used on my side, it 
is to be ascribed that I failed at my second election 
after having succeeded at the first. No sooner was 
the result of the election known than I received 
three or four invitations to become a candidate for 
other constituer cies, chiefly counties ; but even if 
success could have been expected, and this without 
expense, I was not disposed to deny myself the relief 
of returning to private life. I had no cause to feel 
humiliated at my rejection by the electors ; and if I 
had, the feeling would have been far outweighed 
by the numerous expressions of regret which I 
received from all sorts of persons and places, and In a 
most marked degree from those members of the 
Liberal party in Parliament, with whom I had been 
accustomed to act. 

Since that time little has occurred which there is 



THE REMAINDER OF MY LIFE. 313 

need to commemorate in this place. I returned to 
my old pursuits and to the enjoyment of a country 
life in the south of Europe, alternating twice a year 
with a residence of some few weeks or months in the 
neighbourhood of London. I have written various 
articles in periodicals (chiefly in my friend Mr. 
Morley's Fortnightly Review), have made a small 
number of speeches on public occasions, have pub- 
lished the " Subjection of Women," written some 
years before, with some additions * * 

* and have commenced the preparation of 

matter for future books, of which it will be time to 
speak more particularly if I live to finish them. 
Here thereforOj for the present, this memoir may 
close. 



THE END. 



3477-2 



